Sharon Olds, Thomas Sayers Ellis & Elizabeth Alexander June 18, 2009

A rare opportunity to hear some of the most acclaimed poets of our day on one stage, followed by a roundtable discussion.

Presented in association with the American Academy of Poets.

San Francisco-born poet Sharon Olds released her first collection Satan Says in 1980, which earned her the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her following collection received notable acclaim with The Dead & the Living earning a Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Additional works include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf), The Unswept Room (2002), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), and The Father (1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. The New York Times adds, “Her work has a robust sensuality, a delight in the physical that is almost Whitmanesque. She has made the minutiae of a woman's everyday life as valid a subject for poetry as the grand abstract themes that have preoccupied other poets.” Her many honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in more than a hundred collections.

Thomas Sayers Ellis was born and raised in Washington, D.C. His first full collection The Maverick Room was published by Graywolf Press in 2005, for which he received a Mrs. Giles Whiting Writers’ Award and the 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award. The collection is "marked by inner-city youth culture energy that is part lyrical narrative, part ‘Parliament Funkadelic,’ a blend of chaos and control through the sheer and simple power of words” (Midwest Review). He is also the author of The Good Junk (Take Three #1, Graywolf 1996); a chapbook The Genuine Negro Hero (Kent State University Press, 2001); and the chaplet Song On (WinteRed Press 2005). His Breakfast and Blackfist: Notes for Black Poets is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry Series. He is a contributing editor to Callaloo and Poets and Writers Magazine.

Elizabeth Alexander was born in 1962 in Harlem, New York, and grew up in Washington, D.C. Her collections of poetry include American Sublime (Graywolf Press, 2005), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Antebellum Dream Book (2001); Body of Life (1996); and The Venus Hottentot (1990). Alexander's critical work appears in her essay collection, The Black Interior (Graywolf, 2004). She also edited The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (Graywolf, 2005) and Love's Instruments: Poems by Melvin Dixon (1995). Her poems, short stories, and critical writing have been widely published in such journals and periodicals as The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, The Village Voice, The Women's Review of Books, and The Washington Post. Her work has been anthologized in over twenty collections, and in May of 1996, her verse play, Diva Studies, premiered at the Yale School of Drama. Most recently she was selected to read at Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration in 2009.

Presented in association with the American Academy of Poets.

Official Website: http://www.summerstage.org