Tonight at KGB: Sharon Olds + Michael Dickman

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Sharon Olds is the author of ten volumes of poetry, including Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002 (Knopf) The Father (Knopf), and The Dead and the Living (Knopf), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Her most recent volume, Stag’s Leap (Knopf), was awarded the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize and just last week, the 2013 Pulitzer Prize.   In 2005, First Lady Laura Bush invited Olds to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.  Olds declined.  Her open letter, published in the October 10th, 2005 issue of The Nation, closed as follows: “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.”

Michael Dickman is the author of The End of the West (Copper Canyon, 2009) and Flies (2011), which won the James Laughlin Award for the most outstanding second book by an American poet.  Together with his brother, the poet Matthew Dickman, he is the co-author of 50 American Plays.  Dickman has received fellowships from the Michener Center, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Princeton University.  His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, Tin House, Narrative Magazine and others. He has been profiled in Poets & Writers and, alongside his brother, in The New Yorker.