Saskia Hamilton

Saskia Hamilton was born in Washington, D.C., on May 5, 1967, and earned a BA from Kenyon College and an MA from New York University.

Hamilton is the author of All Souls (Graywolf Press, 2023); Corridor  (Graywolf Press, 2014); Divide These (Graywolf Press, 2005); and As for Dream (Graywolf Press, 2001). She is also the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) and the coeditor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

In a review of Divide These, Raymond McDaniel wrote in The Boston Review:

Hamilton’s writing has been called spare and delicate, but neither of these quite gets at the effect of her poems, which are delicate only in the way a suspension bridge is: neither is marked by unnecessary ornament or fragility, and it would be a mistake to regard either as anything other than rigorously tough.

Hamilton is the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has worked for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She joined the English department at Barnard College in 2002, where she served as a professor of English, vice provost for academic programs and curriculum, and director of Women Poets at Barnard.

Saskia Hamilton died in Manhattan, New York, on June 7, 2023.