Background
Kathleen Hirsch was born on June 1, 1953.
50 College St, South Hadley, MA 01075, United States
Mount Holyoke College, where Kathleen Hirsch received her Bachelor of Arts degree.
Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, United States
Brown University, where Kathleen Hirsch received her Master of Fine Arts degree.
(Songs from the Alley is a startling account of life on th...)
Songs from the Alley is a startling account of life on the streets. Wendy and Amanda both came from the suburbs, both had dreams of lasting love and security. But before age 30, both women were homeless.
https://www.amazon.com/Songs-Alley-Kathleen-Hirsch/dp/0374525447
1989
(In A Home in the Heart of a City, the author recounts her...)
In A Home in the Heart of a City, the author recounts her efforts to become a member of the suburban Boston neighborhood where she moved to raise a family, introducing readers to the extraordinary individuals who taught her the meaning of community life in modern America.
https://www.amazon.com/Home-Heart-City-Womans-Community/dp/0374280797/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
1998
(Kathleen Hirsch, at the age of forty, finds herself searc...)
Kathleen Hirsch, at the age of forty, finds herself searching for something more. How, she asks, can women's lives be more spiritually alive and whole? Can we reclaim in our most productive years what we sacrificed to earlier ideas of success? What is the place of silence and creativity in our busy lives? Unable to trek to Tibet or retreat to a cabin in the woods, she enters a season of reflection in the midst of her everyday life. A career crisis, the sudden death of a brother, and the birth of her son, all in a year, deepen her probing. Hirsch examines the role of women's friendships and the definition of worthwhile work.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015CLZ6GE/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
2001
Kathleen Hirsch was born on June 1, 1953.
Kathleen Hirsch was educated at Mount Holyoke College, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and English in 1975. In 1979 she obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing from Brown University.
Kathleen Hirsch, after college, decided that she wanted to spend her life learning about people who weren't the slightest bit like her. She took a job at a daily newspaper writing wedding announcements and later covering local community meetings.
Then she moved to Boston, and after a few years of odd jobs, she became a staff writer for The Boston Phoenix. After observing homeless women near The Phoenix offices, she realized that she had to write their stories. She spent two and a half years on the streets, in shelters, detoxes, and under bridges, buying coffee and listening. Her first book, Songs from the Alley (1989), became the first in-depth look at the lives of single homeless women and the childhoods they survived.
In 1990, she moved from Boston where she'd lived for a decade, into the neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. A Home in the Heart of the City is Hirsch's attempt to capture the flavor, charm, and challenges of living in a neighborhood rich with real-life characters and stories, but facing tough social and economic difficulties.
She has also taught in a social justice program at Boston College. She founded Witness: A Journal of Social Responsibility, an online journal for the college community - students, faculty, and staff - to share their own stories of transformation in a world hungry for hope. Besides her teaching at Boston College, she has also worked as an educator at Harvard University, Wellesley College, and Brown University.
After reporting on others, Hirsch turned her observations on herself in 2001's A Sabbath Life: A Woman's Search for Wholeness. The book examines her mid-life spiritual crisis and eventual reawakening as she struggles with motherhood, her career, and the death of loved ones.
In 2014, she also joined the Catholic website Cruxnow.com as a regular contributor.
(In A Home in the Heart of a City, the author recounts her...)
1998(Kathleen Hirsch, at the age of forty, finds herself searc...)
2001(Songs from the Alley is a startling account of life on th...)
1989
Quotations:
"Stories give us permission to dare new visions of wholeness - worlds hospitable to hope and hurt and wonder."
"We live multivalent lives that can't be fully captured in a single literary form."
"The most important lesson I have learned - from laborers, artists, parents, addicts, priests, and college administrators - is that all of us need the same thing. We need a friend to sit with us and listen, to hold the thread of lives often too scattered or lonely or weary to carry alone. Someone who can see the majesty of our small journey, even when all we can measure is the gaps between old failures."
"Much of the time we are clueless about the marks we make - on the ground, on others' minds and hearts. Snow is an occasion for looking again. It is a beautiful invitational metaphor for the examined life."
Kathleen Hirsch is married and has a son William.