Award-winning poet and author

Naomi Shihab Nye is a best-selling author who has written or edited over 30 books. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East, she uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.

Her works include poetry anthologies for adult and young readers, pictures books, novels for young readers, and books of essays. Naomi has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter Bynner Fellow (awarded by The Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress). Her many awards include the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Prize, numerous awards for her literature for young readers, and the Golden Rose Award, given by the New England Poetry Club (the oldest poetry reading series in the country).

Her work has been presented on National Public Radio and she has been featured on two PBS poetry specials. She has been poetry editor at The Texas Observer for 20 years and was elected to the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2010.

Pultizer Prize-winning poet, NYU professor

Sharon Olds is one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices. She is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Stag’s Leap, and she has been praised for the courage, emotional power, and extraordinary physicality of her work.

Born in San Francisco, California, Sharon studied at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant; a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Dead and the Living; and the San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first collection, Satan Says.

Sharon is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, including: Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002; Blood, Tin, Straw; The Gold Cell; The Wellspring; One Secret Thing; The Unswept Room; The Father; and Odes. Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, Atlantic, and New York Times.

The New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000, Sharon teaches graduate-level poetry at New York University. She also cofounded NYU’s Goldwater Writing Project, a creative writing workshop that was held at Roosevelt Island’s Coler-Goldwater Hospital.