Olds, Sharon

Sharon Olds is the author of the collection Stag’s Leap, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2012. She is also the author of 12 previous books of poetry, including Satan Says and The Dead and the Living, and the winner of many other awards and honors. Olds teaches in the graduate creative writing program at New York University and helped found NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island residents, and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for poetry, Balladz (Knopf) is a self-scouring, exhilarating volume that opens with a section of quarantine poems. “At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror,” she writes. Olds sings of her childhood, young womanhood, and maturity all mixed up together. She writes about seeing her white privilege without apology. It is Olds’ gift to us that in the richly detailed exposure of her sorrows, she can still elegize songbirds, her true kin, and write that heaven comes here in life, not after it.