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Sharon Olds

b. 1942
https://www.sharonolds.net/biography
Image of Sharon Olds
David Bartolomi

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

Poems by Sharon Olds
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Bibliography

POETRY

  • Satan Says, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1980.
  • The Dead and the Living, Knopf (New York, NY), 1984.
  • The Gold Cell, Knopf (New York, NY), 1987.
  • The Matter of This World, Slow Dancer Press, 1987.
  • The Sign of Saturn, Secker & Warburg, 1991.
  • The Father, Knopf (New York, NY), 1992.
  • The Wellspring: Poems, Knopf (New York, NY), 1996.
  • Blood, Tin, Straw, Knopf (New York, NY), 1999.
  • The Unswept Room, Knopf (New York, NY), 2002.
  • Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002, Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.
  • One Secret Thing, Knopf (New York, NY), 2008.
  • Stag’s Leap, Knopf (New York, NY), 2012.
  • Odes, Knopf (New York, NY), 2016.

OTHER

  • (Author of foreword) Tory Dent, What Silence Equals, Persea Books (New York, NY) 1993.
  • (Author of preface) Muriel Rukeyser, The Orgy: An Irish Journey of Passion and Transformation, Paris Press (Ashfield, MA) 1997.

CONTRIBUTOR TO ANTHOLOGIES

  • The Norton Introduction to Poetry, 2nd edition, Norton (New York, NY), 1981.
  • The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Robert Pack, Sydney Lea, and Jay Parini, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1985.
  • Three Genres, The Writing of Poetry, Fiction, and Drama, edited by Stephen Minot, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1988.
  • The Pushcart Prize, VIII: Best of the Small Presses, Wainscott, 1989.
  • Read to Write, Donald M. Murray, Holt (New York, NY), 1990.
  • The Longman Anthology of American Poetry: Colonial to Contemporary, edited by Hilary Russell, Longman (New York, NY), 1992.
  • The Armless Maiden: And Other Tales for Childhood's Survivors, edited by Terri Windling, Tor, (New York, NY), 1995.
  • For a Living: The Poetry of Work, edited by Nicholas Coles and Peter Oresick, University of Illinois Press, (Urbana, IL), 1995.
  • Our Mothers, Our Selves: Writers and Poets Celebrating Motherhood, edited by J. B. Bernstein, Karen J. Donnelly, Bergin & Garvey Trade, 1996.
  • The House Is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone edited by Wendy Barker, Sandra M. Gilbert, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1996.
  • By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, edited by Molly McQuade, Graywolf Press (Saint Paul, MN), 2000.
  • Literature and Its Writers: A Compact Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, edited by Ann Charters, Samuel Charters, Bedford/St. Martin's Press (Boston, MA) 2004.

Contributor to literary journals and magazines, including American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Atlantic Monthly, Iowa Review, Kayak, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, Ms., New Republic, Nation, New Yorker, Paris Review, Pequod, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and Yale Review. Olds's works have been translated into Italian, Chinese, French, and Russian.