Sharon Olds is a contemporary poet known for her shocking and extremely physical poetry.  She was born in 1942 in San Francisco

She attended Stanford University and received a Ph. D. in English from Columbia University.  This was a transitional moment in her life because she vowed to be a poet even if it meant giving up everything she had learned.

Early honors: National Endowment for the Arts grant
                   Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship

Published Works:

• Satan Says (1980)—This anthology of poems containing intensely personal themes and physicality was critically acclaimed for its shocking use of metaphor and won the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center award.
• The Dead and the Living (1983)—Olds’ second work consisting of “public” poems of historical events and “private poems that created a family portrait, demonstrating the continuity of public and private life.  It was chosen as a Lament Poetry Selection and won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award.
• The Gold Cell (1987)

• The Father (1992)—This work is a description of a daughter’s loss of her father to cancer that was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award.

• The Wellspring (1996)

• Blood, Tin, Straw (1999)—The most recent of Olds’ published works that led to her honor as the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998-2000.

Currently, Sharon Olds resides in New York City and teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and the NYU Workshop Program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York.   

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