Sharon Olds, former New York State Poet under the auspices of the NYS Writers Institute (1998-2000), received the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Stag's Leap (2012), a poignant account in poetry of her experiences when her husband left her after 30 years of marriage.
Her work, often autobiographical in nature, is renowned for its treatment of marriage, motherhood, intimacy, and the human condition. She is a recipient of the 2016 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Lamont Poetry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
A professor at NYU, she is cofounder of the NYU Goldwater Hospital Writing Workshop for the severely physical challenged, and the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Her collection Arias (Oct. 2019) includes poems about intimate life, political conscience, race and class, delivered with operatic passion, anguish and solo force. She is the author of 13 previous collections including The Father (1992), The Unswept Room (2002), and Odes (2016).