Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds (Blood, Tin, Straw, Gold Cell, One Secret Thing, Strike Sparks, The Dead and the Living, The Father, The unswept room, The wellspring, Stag's Leap)

Sharon Olds was born 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 short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England, and The unswept room was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU workshop program for residents of Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. She lives in New Hampshire and in New York City. (added from Random House)… (more)

Sharon Olds (Blood, Tin, Straw, Gold Cell, One Secret Thing, Strike Sparks, The Dead and the Living, The Father, The unswept room, The wellspring, Stag's Leap)

Sharon Olds was born 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 short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England, and The unswept room was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU workshop program for residents of Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. She lives in New Hampshire and in New York City. (added from Random House)… (more)

Readings by Sherman Alexie, Tina Chang, Toi Derricotte, Michael Dickman, Timothy Donnelly, Cornelius Eady, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Nick Flynn, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Marie Howe, Dante Micheaux, Sharon Olds and Tracy K. Smith, with musical interludes by mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran.

href="/author/cliftonlucille">Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) was one of the most distinguished, decorated and beloved poets of our time. Toni Morrison notes that “the love readers feel for Lucille Clifton — both the woman and her poetry — is constant and deeply felt.” This tribute to her life and work celebrates the publication of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 and her role as a major force in poetry in the last quarter of the 20th century (rmharris)… (more)

Sharon Olds reads from One Secret Thing.

Part of the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival 2008.

In the words of Michael Ondaatje, Sharon Olds’ poetry is “pure fire in the
hands.” Olds has been writing for almost 30 years and her poetry has won her
a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Her poetry
is filled with sensuality, humour, sprung rhythm and stunning imagery. She
expresses raw truths about domestic and political violence, sexuality, family
relationships and the body. Her new collection, One Secret Thing, completes
her cycle of family poems in a book that is intense and harmonic, playful with
language and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony.
$15 + $.50 facility surcharge (vegetrendian)… (more)

Sharon Olds

Part of the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival 2008.

When American poet Sharon Olds stood on the
steps of the library at Columbia University having
earned her PhD, she vowed to become a poet,
even if it meant giving up everything she had
learned. The vow she made freed her to develop
her own voice and set her on a path that has won
her international acclaim over three decades.
Olds has published eight volumes of poetry, her
work has appeared in more than 100 anthologies
and collections, and it has been translated into
seven languages. Yet Olds remains modest about
her place in history. “I don’t know what poetry
is,” Olds says. Spend an evening with one of
America’s greatest living poets.
The Solo Author Series is sponsored by
Raincoast Books and supported by the
F.K. Morrow Foundation.
$20 (vegetrendian)… (more)