Sharon Olds

Poet Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco and grew up in Berkeley, California where she was raised, she has said, as a “hellfire Calvinist.” She attended Stanford University and earned her Ph.D. at Columbia in 1972. She was thirty-seven when she published her first book of poems, Satan Says (1980). In 2022, Olds won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Olds is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Balladz (October 2022). Arias (2019) was short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Stag’s Leap (2012), which included poems that explored details of her divorce, received the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize.

Olds’s work explores a wide range of topics and themes. Her collection Odes (2016) used the venerable poetic mode to address numerous topics including gender, age, and sexual politics. One Secret Thing (2009) explored similar veins of autobiography, personal myth and dream. Olds released a collection of selected poems, Strike Sparks, in 2004. Collecting poems from over two decades, the book received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was widely praised as a good introduction to her major themes. Olds is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events. 

Olds has won numerous awards for her work, including the Joan Margarit International Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Widely anthologized, her work has also been published in a number of journals and magazines. She was New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. Olds’s National Book Critics Circle Award-winning volume The Dead and the Living (1984) has sold more than 50,000 copies, ranking it as one of contemporary poetry’s best-selling volumes. 

Olds is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, where she helped to found workshop programs for residents of Coler Hospital, and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. She lives in New York City