Biography
Sharon Olds is one of the few contemporary poets that could be called famous. She is the winner of countless major prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, and her books have been bestsellers throughout her career. Old’s book The Dead and the Living (1984) alone has sold more than 50,000 copies. Her latest book, Arias, was shortlisted for both the Griffin Poetry Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her work is known for its candor, emotional power, and frank eroticism. Olds often draws from her own life, mining personal and intimate details about her children, her parents, and her romances. Her work is often described as accessible.Olds herself maintains that she doesn’t want to “ask[] a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets.” She was born in San Francisco but grew up in Berkeley California, where she was raised as a strict Calvinist. Olds currently teaches in the graduate writing program at New York University.