Rachel Hadas

Rachel Hadas studied classics at Harvard, poetry at Johns Hopkins, and comparative literature at Princeton. Between college and graduate school she spent four years in Greece, an experience that surfaces variously in much of her work. Since 1981 she has taught in the English Department of the Newark (NJ) campus of Rutgers University, and has also taught courses in literature and writing at Columbia and Princeton, as well as serving on the poetry faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the West Chester Poetry Conference. In addition to her Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, she has received an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Rachel Hadas is the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and translations, most recently co-edited the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (Norton 2009); her latest book of poems is The Ache of Appetite (Copper Beech Press 2010). Forthcoming in 2011 is book of prose about her husband’s illness entitled Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry (Paul Dry Books).

Spouse: George Edwards, Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition, 1980