In additoin to Olds' reading, the four winners of the High School Poetry Prize were awarded their prizes and each read her winning poem. The event was free and open to the public. For more information, please consult the Smith College Poetry Center, or the Smith College press release.

To commemorate Olds' visit and as part of the Poetry Center's growing broadside series, Barry Moser, Printer to the College, has made a fine letterpress broadside of her poem “April, New Hampshire” from “The Unswept Room” (Alfred A. Knopf, BOA Editions, 2002), complete with an original illustration. The broadside's public unveiling took place on April 8 when it became available for sale at a one-time reduced price.

Strike sparks : selected poems,
1980-2002, by Sharon Olds

The author of eight books of poetry, Olds is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Lamont Poetry Selection, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Her work has been reprinted in over 100 anthologies and appears regularly in The New Yorker and other major journals. Olds served as the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998-2000. Currently, she is Erich Maria Remarque Professor in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and also oversees the poetry workshop she founded in 1984 at New York's Goldwater Hospital for the severely disabled.

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The unswept room,
by Sharon Olds