Sharon Olds Wins 2022 Frost Medal

The Poetry Society of America (PSA) has announced that Sharon Olds is the 2022 recipient of the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry.

The PSA's Board of Directors cited Olds as "a poet of constant linguistic surprise" and "a master of the American vernacular... who has impacted this generation and future generations of poets in so many diverse and as yet to be discovered ways."

Named for Robert Frost, and first given in 1930, the Frost Medal is one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in American poetry and is awarded annually at the discretion of the PSA's Board of Governors. Previous winners of the award include Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Lucille Clifton, and most recently, N. Scott Momaday.

Olds is the author of twelve books of poetry, including most recently Arias (2019), short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize, Odes (2016) and Stag’s Leap (2012), 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 (1980), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living (1983. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and lives in New York City.