Sharon Olds

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Arts & Culture

Sharon Olds

American poet

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Sharon Olds

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Category: Arts & Culture

Born:: November 19, 1942, San Francisco, California, U.S. (age 81)

Awards And Honors:: Pulitzer Prize (2013)

Notable Works:: “Arias”; “Balladz”; “Blood, Tin, Straw”; “I Go Back to May 1937”; “One Secret Thing”; “Satan Says”; “Stag’s Leap”; “The Dead and the Living”; “The Gold Cell”; “The Matter of This World: New and Selected Poems”; “The Unswept Room”; “The Wellspring”

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Sharon Olds (born November 19, 1942, San Francisco, California, U.S.) American poet best known for her powerful, often erotic, imagery of the body and her examination of the family. Olds grew up in San Francisco, the daughter of an abusive alcoholic father and a weak compliant mother; her anger at her parents would influence her poetry. She studied at Stanford University (B.A., 1964) and at Columbia University (Ph.D., 1972). Thereafter she taught poetry at numerous schools and in workshops. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for her work in 1981. Olds’s first collection, Satan Says (1980), describes her early sexual ...(100 of 283 words)

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