Steven L. Hirsch was born in New York City in 1960. Raised in the NY area, he graduated high school from the Storm King School in Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY, in 1977 and earned his B.A. from Bard College in Drama/Dance in 1985. Steve also earned an A.A. certificate degree in Theatre from Naropa University in 1982 where he was a student of both poetry as well as performance arts inspired by Buddhist practices. He was an apprentice to Allen Ginsberg in 1979-1980 at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and he studied Vajrayana Buddhism with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche as well as many other visiting lamas and spiritual teachers.
In 1983, after his junior year at Bard, Steve’s father Louis died. He left school to manage his family business of manufacturing bridal veils and accessories in New York’s garment center. Concurrently, Steve founded the literary magazine Heaven Bone in 1985 to showcase surreal, experimental, and spiritual poetry as well as art, photography, fiction and essays. Along with five poetry chapbooks, an anthology of anti-Iraq War poetry and a collection of fiction, he published twelve issues of the magazine, with the final issue having been released in 2000. Steve finished his B.A. degree credits at the New School for Social Research in NYC while running the family business. Leaving the business to his mom in 1990, Steve entered the computer consulting world and mastered the technologies for digital publishing and marketing workflow management. He is a certified expert in Adobe Workfront and has provided his creative and technical expertise to dozens of Fortune 500 companies for more than three decades.
In recent years he has been riding his Harley all over the Northeast, studying Buddhism and writing, and playing Latin and African hand drums as a founding member of the drum circle “Spirithawk.” Steve is the author of Ramapo 500 Affirmations (Flower Thief, 1998), Demon Commuter (Giant Steps Press, 2023), and he has had poems appear in Hunger, Napalm Health Spa Report, Pudding, Big Scream, Hazmat Review, Muse Apprentice Guild, and Etcetera among others.
Steve has performed his poetry at numerous venues including the Core Gallery in New Paltz; the Catskill Mt. Foundation in Hunter, NY; Monkey Joe’s Cafe in Kingston, NY; the Dactyl Foundation Gallery, NYC; The Bowery Poetry Club, NYC; A Gathering of the Tribes, NYC; The Howland Cultural Center, Beacon, NY., and Penny Lane, Boulder, CO.
Steve resides on Woodcock Mountain in the Hudson Valley region of NY State with his wife Karen, daughter Jesse Mai Lotus, and two cats.
