Skip to content

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University.  She is the recipient of the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement, as well as the winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap.  She is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the winner of other awards and honors, including the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living, which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983.  Arias was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2020.  The Father was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, 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 found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of the former S.S. Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  She lives in New York City.

Balladz 2023 Longlist

Alfred A. Knopf, USA
Finalist in:

Judges’ Citation

The aria is a melody for single voice and these poems sing the music of what happens in the everyday with mother, father, lover, child, unknown citizen.

The aria is a melody for single voice and these poems sing the music of what happens in the everyday with mother, father, lover, child, unknown citizen. Memory is elevated onto some plane of eternity by the pure lyric grace of this work, this witness. And work it is – there is the heft of heavy lifting, of difficult emotional material moving like magma under enormous pressure to issue volcanically, erupting into the moment of the poem. It is not just that the personal is political, the intimate here is revolutionary. If there is elegy, there is also transformative empathy and an authoritative moral force. Like Dickinson, like Whitman, like Snyder, like Rich, hers is a voice, demotic and mythic, that defines our times.


See also