Jennifer Michael Hecht

Hecht took a doctorate in the history of science at Columbia in 1995 and has worked ever since as both historian and poet, a double life that produced The Wonder Paradox. The 2023 book asks what someone without a religion should do with the human appetite for ritual, and answers mostly with poems, calling on Sappho, Rumi, Issa, Tagore, Frost, Szymborska and Angelou to furnish weddings, funerals, seasons and ordinary weekday mornings. It follows her histories Doubt and The Happiness Myth, and The End of the Soul, which won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. Her poetry collections The Next Ancient World and Funny took the Norma Farber and Felix Pollak prizes. She taught history at Nassau Community College from 1994 to 2007 and has since taught in the MFA programmes at The New School and Columbia.