Sharon Olds Popular Books
Sharon Olds Biography & Facts
Sharon Olds (born November 19, 1942) is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU. Early life Sharon Olds was born on November 19, 1942, in San Francisco, California, but was brought up in Berkeley, California, along with her siblings. She was raised as a "hellfire Calvinist," as she describes it. Her father, like his before him, was an alcoholic who was often abusive to his children. In Olds' writing she often refers to the time (or possibly even times) when her father tied her to a chair. Olds' mother was often either unable or too afraid to come to the aid of her children. The strict religious environment in which Olds was raised had certain rules of censorship and restriction. Olds was not permitted to go to the movies and the family did not own a television, but her reading was not censored. She liked fairy tales, and also read Nancy Drew and Life magazine. By nature "a pagan and a pantheist," she has said that in childhood she was exposed in her church to "both great literary art and bad literary art," with "the great art being psalms and the bad art being hymns. The four-beat was something that was just part of my consciousness from before I was born." Of her Calvinist childhood, she said in 2011 that though she was about 15 when she conceived of herself as an atheist, "I think it was only very recently that I can really tell that there's nobody there with a copybook making marks against your name." Olds was sent east to Dana Hall School, an all-girls school for grades 6 to 12 in Wellesley, Massachusetts, that boasts an impressive list of alumnae. There she studied mostly English, History, and Creative Writing. Her favorite poets included William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, but it was Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems that she carried in her purse through 10th grade. For her bachelor's degree Olds returned to California where she earned her BA at Stanford University in 1964. Following this, Olds once again moved cross country to New York, where she earned her Ph.D. in English in 1972 from Columbia University. She teaches creative writing at New York University. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on "Emerson's Prosody," because she appreciated the way he defied convention. Personal life On March 23, 1968, she married Dr. David Douglas Olds in New York City and, in 1969, gave birth to the first of their two children. In 1997, after 29 years of marriage, they divorced. She lives in the same Upper West Side apartment she has lived in for many years while working as a Professor at New York University. In a review of her 2022 collection Balladz, Tristram Fane Saunders mentions the moving poems she wrote about her longtime partner, the late Carl Wallman of New Hampshire, who died in 2020. In 2005, First Lady Laura Bush invited Olds to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Olds declined the invitation and responded with an open letter published in The Nation. The editors suggested others follow her example. She concluded her letter by explaining: "So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it." Poetry Following her Ph.D., Olds let go of an attachment to what she thought she knew about poetic convention and began to write about her family, abuse, and sex, focusing on the work and not the audience. Olds has said that she is more informed by the work of poets such as Galway Kinnell, Muriel Rukeyser and Gwendolyn Brooks than by confessional poets like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath. Plath, she comments "was a great genius, with an IQ of at least double mine" and while these women charted well the way of women in the world she says "their steps were not steps I wanted to put my feet in." When Olds first sent her poetry to a literary magazine she received a reply saying, "This is a literary magazine. If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest the Ladies' Home Journal. The true subjects of poetry are … male subjects, not your children." Olds eventually published her first collection, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of 37. Satan Says sets up the sexual and bodily candour that would run through much of her work. In "The Sisters of Sexual Treasure" she writes, "As soon as my sister and I got out of our/ mother's house, all we wanted to/do was fuck, obliterate/her tiny sparrow body and narrow/grasshopper legs." The collection is divided into four sections: "Daughter," "Woman," "Mother," "Journeys." These titles echo the familial influence that is prevalent in much of Olds' work. The Dead and the Living was published in February 1984. This collection is divided into two sections: "Poems for the Dead" and "Poems for the Living." The first section begins with poems about global injustices. These injustices include the Armenian genocide during WWI, the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and even the death of Marilyn Monroe. Olds' book The Wellspring (1996), shares with her previous work the use of raw language and startling images to convey truths about domestic and political violence and family relationships. In a New York Times review, Lucy McDiarmid hailed her poetry for its vision: "like Whitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression." Alicia Ostriker noted Olds traces the "erotics of family love and pain." Ostriker continues: "In later collections, [Olds] writes of an abusive childhood, in which miserably married parents bully and punish and silence her. She writes, too, of her mother's apology "after 37 years," a moment when "The sky seemed to be splintering, like a window/someone is bursting into or out of." Olds' 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. She has been published in Beloit Poetry Journal. She was the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998–2000. Stag's Leap was published in 2013. The poems were written in 1997, following the divorce from her husband of 29 years. The poems focus on her husband, and even sometimes his mistress. The collection won the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. She is the first American woman to win this award. It also won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Women's Movement Olds did not participate in the Women's Movement at first, but she says, "My first child was born in 1969. In 1968 the Women's Movement in New York City—especially among a lot of women I knew—was very alive. I had these strong ambitions .... Discover the Sharon Olds popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Sharon Olds books.
Best Seller Sharon Olds Books of 2024
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The Care and Keeping of Freddy
Susan Hill LongFor fans of Kate DiCamillo and Sharon Creech comes this “both raw and warm in its compassionate telling” (Publishers Weekly) middle grade novel about a young girl, her pet bearded ...
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Sparrow Being Sparrow
Gail DonovanAn endearingly energetic fourth grader takes on the big job of finding new homes for her neighbor’s seven cats in this “uplifting” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) illustrated m...
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Resistance, Rebellion, Life
Amit MajmudarPoets on the march: 50 crucial poems written in response to the current political climate, selected and introduced by the Ohio Poet Laureateand son of immigrantsAmit Majmudar. In a...
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Back on the Map
Lisa Ann ScottWith their mother long dead and their father unknown, elevenyearold Penny Porter and her twin brother Parker have been bouncing around foster homes for as long as they can remember...
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Grandma Rules
Jill Milligan & Michael MilliganA response to all those grandmother books with flowers and puppies on the cover, Grandma Rules is a book for the hip, baby boomer grandma who realizes that after all the work she p...
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Rolling On
Jamie SumnerIn this heartfelt companion to Jamie Sumner’s acclaimed and beloved novels Roll with It and Time to Roll, Ellie finds herself faced with first love and learning to let go.It’s the ...
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Mid-Air
Alicia D. WilliamsA tendersouled boy reeling from the death of his best friend struggles to fit into a world that wants him to grow up tough and unfeeling in this stunning middle grade novel in vers...
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Time to Roll
Jamie SumnerIn the eagerly anticipated sequel to Jamie Sumner’s acclaimed and beloved middle grade novel Roll with It, Ellie finds her own way to shine.Ellie is so not the pageant type. They’r...
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Eat This Poem
Nicole GulottaA literary cookbook that celebrates food and poetry, two of life's essential ingredients.In the same way that salt seasons ingredients to bring out their flavors, poetry seaso...
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Odes
Sharon OldsPULITZER PRIZE WINNER An intimate collection of poems that “picks up where Stag’s Leap left off, which is to say that it contains some of the best and most ingenious poems of her ...
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Cross My Heart and Never Lie
Nora Dåsnes & Matt Bagguley★ WINNER of the 2024 Stonewall Book Award, American Library AssociationPerfect for fans of The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag, HeartStopper by Alice Oseman, and Jen Wang'...
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Meet Me Halfway
Anika Fajardo“A romp of a read!” Rebecca Balcárcel, Pura Belpré Honor–winning author of The Other Half of HappyWhen new classmates Mattie and Mercedes meet and realize they have the same Colomb...
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Saving Winslow
Sharon CreechIndie Next List Pick · ALA Notable Children’s Book · Texas Bluebonnet Award Winner“A winning tale of love.” Kirkus (starred review)Perfect for fans of Charlotte’s Web and The One a...
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Arias
Sharon OldsFollowing her recent Odes, the Pulitzer Prizewinning poet gives us radical new poems of intimate life and political conscience, of race and class and a mother's violence.The atom b...
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The Other Passenger
Louise CandlishOne of CrimeReads’s Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2021 Longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier 2021 Crime Novel of the Year The “queen of the suckerpunch twist” (Ruth Ware, #1 ...
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Understanding Sharon Olds
Russell BrickeyA thorough examination of the author's deeply personal and oftencontroversial poetryUnderstanding Sharon Olds explores this Pulitzer Prizewinning poet's major themes, characters, l...
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The Monkey Grammarian
Octavio Paz, Ilan Stavans & Helen R. LaneNobel Prize–winner Octavio Paz offers a dazzling mind journey to the sources of poetry. Poet, diplomat, writer, philosopher, hailed as an “intellectual literary oneman band” by the...
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Sparrow Spreads Her Wings
Gail DonovanIn this sequel to the “uplifting” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) Sparrow Being Sparrow, Sparrow rescues an injured animal but soon wonders if she’s taken on more than she can ...
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Cookie Time
Jessie SimaFrom the New York Times bestselling creator of Not Quite Narwhal comes a tasty picture book about two kids who get into time travel shenanigans while trying to skip waiting for coo...
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Poems After Midnight
KnopfMost poets are or have been at one time or another members of what Mark Strand here calls “The Midnight Club”: they are insomniacs, or feel most productive in the middle of the nig...
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Balladz
Sharon OldsNATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST Songs from our era of communal grief and reckoningby the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called "a poet for these times, a pow...
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Best American Poetry 2018
David LehmanThe 2018 edition of the Best American Poetry“a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune)collects the most significant poems of the year, chosen by Poet ...
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Willard Gibbs
Muriel Rukeyser & Maria PopovaA poet’s lost biography of the forgotten scientist who founded physical chemistry, shaping much of the 20th centuryas well as an ingenious and expansive treatise on American creati...
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Sharon Creech 4-Book Collection
Sharon CreechNewbery and Carnegie Medalwinning author Sharon Creech's stories become instant classics, beloved for their genuine characters and celebration of classic themes such as the gifts o...
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One Secret Thing
Sharon OldsA powerful collection of poems about family and griefby the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called "a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won’t back ...
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Kin
Carole Boston WeatherfordA Coretta Scott King Honor BookAn “imaginative and moving” (The Horn Book, starred review) portrait of a Black family tree shaped by enslavement and freedom, rendered in searing po...
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Hollywood Beach Beauties
David WillsA glamorous and nostalgic celebration of the summer through stunning retro photographs of Hollywood beautiesThe author of the acclaimed photo compilations Vegas Gold, Hollywood in ...
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Our Red Book
Rachel Kauder NalebuffA collection of essays, oral histories, and artworks about periods across all stages of life, gathered by the editor of the New York Times bestselling anthology My Little Red Book....
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She Walks in Beauty
Caroline KennedyIn She Walks in Beauty, Caroline Kennedy has once again marshaled the gifts of our greatest poets to pay a very personal tribute to the human experience, this time to the complex a...
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The Best American Erotic Poems
David LehmanThere is a deep tradition of eroticism in American poetry. Thoughtful, provocative, moving, and sometimes mirthful, the poems collected in The Best American Erotic Poems celebrate ...
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Fresh Ink
Lamar GilesAll it takes to rewrite the rules is a little fresh ink in this remarkable YA collection from thirteen of the most recognizable diverse authors writing today including Nicola Yoon,...
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The Last Gift
Sarah J. NaughtonThe perfect short story for a dark wintry night psychological thriller writer Sarah J Naughton chills you to the bone with this Christmas tale in the tradition of MR James.On 24th...