He is the son of lawyer, author, and biblical scholar Jonathan Kirsch, and a 1997 graduate of Harvard College.

He was the book critic for the New York Sun until it ceased publishing in 2008. He was previously the assistant literary editor for The New Republic, “no small achievement for a writer in his 20s.” Prosaic Judgments He is also the author of the weekly column "The Reader" on Nextbook. Richard John Neuhaus writing in First Things called Kirsch “a literary critic of some distinction.” FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » RJN: 2.24.06 Adam Kirsch is books Writing in The Nation, John Palattella describes Kirsch as “the intellectual offspring of the New Formalists, a small group of poets and critics...among them Brad Leithauser, Timothy Steele and Dana Gioia (head of the National Endowment for the Arts)...whose essays and poems in defense of traditional formal conventions were championed by The New Criterion during the 1980s.” He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, and other magazines. Kirsch is a contributing editor to Harvard Magazine.

Books

• The Thousand Wells, 2002
• The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, 2008
• The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets (Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath) 2005
• Invasions: New Poems, 2008
• Benjamin Disraeli, 2008

Articles

• Hannah Arendt.

Reviews