Sharon Olds was born in 1942, in San Francisco,
and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her first
book, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco
Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was
both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National
Book Critics Circle Award. The Father was shortlisted for the
T.S. Eliot Prize in England. She teaches poetry workshops in the
Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helps run
the N.Y.U. workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in
New York.
Sharon Olds was the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998 to 2000.
From Sharon Olds--a stunning new collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor. From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical, emotional, and spiritual sensations that are seldom the stuff of poetry.
