Saskia Hamilton

Saskia Hamilton (1967-2023) was born in Washington, D.C., and educated at Kenyon College, New York University, and Boston University. She was the author of the poetry collections As for Dream (2001), Divide These (2005), Corridor (2014), and All Souls (2023), all from Graywolf Press. She was also the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019), and a new edition of Lowell's The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972, 1973 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019). She was the co-editor (with Thomas Travisano) of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

Her honors included a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2020 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation. In 2021 she received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She worked for the Folger Shakespeare Library (1992-97) and for Lannan Foundation, first as Associate Director and then Literary Program Director (1997-98). In 2002 she joined the Barnard English Department, where she taught courses in the history of lyric poetry, poetics, poets’ letters, twentieth century poetry, and poetry writing. She lived in New York.