Grinnell College Athletics

Edward M. Hirsch ’72 was a dynamic two-sport athlete for the Pioneers, playing for both the football and baseball teams during his college years. An English major who was highly regarded for his literary talents and wide-ranging academic interests, Hirsch was an NCAA First-Team All-American in football and was even the top vote-getter in 1971. On the football field, he had nearly 100 receptions for over 1,000 yards in his career and ranked second all-time on the receiving list. Following his graduation from Grinnell with honors and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Hirsch earned a Watson fellowship and then an NCAA postgraduate fellowship. After winning the Whitcomb Poetry Prize, he continued to write poetry and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in folklore.  He would then serve as a professor at Wayne State University and the University of Houston. Hirsch is now a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including Wild Gratitude, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and five books of prose, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller.  He has received awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the MacArthur Foundation.  In 1985 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, awarded to those that have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.   Hirsch would eventually become president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2003. He contributed a great deal to his teammates and friends at Grinnell College, and he has contributed even more to the cultural world of the country.