Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently Balladz, a finalist for the National Book Award; Arias, short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize; Odes; and Stag's Leap, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and England's T. S. Eliot Prize. Her other honors include the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living, which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. The Father was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England, and The Unswept Room was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU workshop program for residents of Coler-Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. She lives in New York City.