Sharon Olds, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, former New York State Poet Laureate, and Erich Maria Remarque Professor of English at New York University, will read from her new collection of poems, One Secret Thing (Knopf), on Thursday, April 2, at 7 p.m. The reading, which is hosted by the NYU Creative Writing Program Spring Reading Series, takes place at NYU’s Vanderbilt Hall, Tishman Auditorium, 40 Washington Square South (at MacDougal Street). It is free and open to the public. For further information, call 212.998.8816 or visit www.cwp.fas.nyu.edu. Olds will be introduced by the poet Deborah Landau, NYU Creative Writing Program director.
One Secret Thing completes Olds’ cycle of family poems, confronting the reader with a new self-awareness and sense of irony. Writing in O Magazine, Mark Doty calls the poems “rife with emotional life, shifting beautifully from laughter to longing, rage to sorrow.” She depicts the traumas of her first decades with undeniable force, writing of sex, remembered pain, parenthood, the dramatic, abusive household in which she grew up, and her tender relationship with her own daughter.
Olds is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Dead and the Living, which was the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983, The Gold Cell, The Father, The Wellspring, and The Unswept Room. In 1997 she received the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award.