Olds+Biography

Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. She was, in her own words, raised as a "hellfire Calvinist." After graduating from Stanford she moved east to earn a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. Olds describes the completion of her doctorate as a transitional moment in her life: standing on the steps of the library at Columbia University, she vowed to become a poet, even if it meant giving up everything she had learned. In one respect, Olds’s imaginary sacrifice of her graduate education was an essential precondition for her artistic development. As a graduate student Olds had struggled to emulate the poets she studied. The vow she made--to write her own poetry, no matter how bad it might be--freed her to develop her own voice. Olds has published eight volumes of poetry. Her first collection, //Satan Says// (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. //Satan Says// responds to what Olds describes as some of her early poetic questions: "Is there anything that shouldn’t or can’t be written about in a poem? What has never been written about in a poem?" Startling readers with candid language and explicit imagery, //Satan Says// trangresses socially imposed silences. The poems explore intensely personal themes with unflinching physicality, enacting what Alicia Ostriker describes as an "erotics of family love and pain."(28). Olds’ second volume, //The Dead and the Living,// won the 1983 Lamont Poetry Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The collection opens with "public" poems that examine a series of historical photographs. The "private" poems that follow are family portraits of grandparents, parents, and children. //The Dead and the Living// merges historical themes with privates lives, as one critic points out, "to chart a new attitude toward history" and "suggest a fundamental similarity and continuity between our public stories and our private ones." (Phelan 16). Following //The Dead and the Living//, Olds published //The Gold Cell//, (1987) //The Father//, (1992), //The Wellspring,// (1996) and //Blood, Tin, Straw// (1999). //The Father//, a series of poems about a daughter’s loss of her father to cancer, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for The National Book Critics’ Circle Award. As in her earlier works, Sharon Olds continues to witness pain, love, desire, and grief with relentless courage. In the words of Michael Ondaatje, her poems are "pure fire in the hands." Olds’s work is anthologized in over 100 collections, ranging from literary/poetry textbooks to special collections. Her poetry has been translated into seven languages for international publications. Sharon Olds 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 in New York. She is the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998-2000. 