Sam Sax (poet)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Poet
- novelist
- educator
- bury it
- Yr Dead
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.jpg) Sax at the 2025 AWP Conference | |
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Sam Sax (stylized in all lowercase) is a queer Jewish American poet and novelist. They are the author of three poetry collections, Madness, bury it, and Pig, and the novel Yr Dead.[1][2] bury it received the James Laughlin Award, and Yr Dead was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction.[2][3]
Sax earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin.[1] In 2015, they received a creative writing fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.[4] In 2018, Sax was named a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.[5] Sax is a former Stegner Fellow and has been a lecturer in the ITALIC program at Stanford University.[6]
Poetry
Before publishing a full-length collection, Sax published several chapbooks, including A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters, Sad Boy / Detective, Straight, and All the Rage.[4][7][8][9]
Sax's first full-length collection, Madness, was published by Penguin Books in 2017 after it was selected by Terrance Hayes for the National Poetry Series.[10][11] Publishers Weekly described the collection as addressing mental health, family, the Holocaust, and the AIDS crisis, while noting that some poems could lose focus.[12] In the San Francisco Chronicle, Diana Whitney wrote that the collection uses the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to examine medical and social classifications of sexuality and sanity.[13]
Sax's second collection, bury it, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2018.[14] The collection received the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.[15] Maya Phillips, reviewing the collection for the Academy of American Poets, discussed its treatment of queerness, violence, grief, and recurring bridge imagery.[16] Publishers Weekly noted the book's attention to sound and wordplay.[17]
Sax's third collection, Pig, was published by Scribner in 2023.[18] Publishers Weekly described the book as using the pig as both subject and object while addressing queerness, beauty, capitalism, and the body.[19] Vulture included Pig in its list of the best books of 2023.[20] Pig was a finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Poetry.[21]