Sam Hamill

2018
Read poems by this poet

Sam Hamill was born in 1943 and raised in Utah. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he served as the editor of the university’s literary magazine. In 1972, with money from a prize he was awarded for editorial excellence, he cofounded Copper Canyon Press along with Tree Swenson and William O’Daly.

The year after the press was founded, Hamill published his first poetry collection, Heroes of the Teton Mythos (Copper Canyon Press, 1973). He went on to write numerous books of poetry, including After Morning Rain (Tiger Bark Press), published posthumously in 2018; Habitation: Collected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2014); Destination Zero: Poems 1970–1995 (White Pine Press, 1995); and Triada (Copper Canyon Press, 1978).

Hamill also published four books of literary prose, including A Poet’s Work: The Other Side of Poetry (Broken Moon Press, 1990), and many works of translation, including Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (Shambhala Publications, 2005) and Matsuo Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Interior (Shambhala Publications, 1998). He edited several volumes of poetry as well, including The Gift of Tongues: Twenty-five Years of Poetry from Copper Canyon Press (Copper Canyon Press, 1996).

About Hamill, Hayden Carruth wrote,

No one—I mean no one—has done the momentous work of presenting poetry better than Sam Hamill. His editing and publishing, his criticism and translations, his own very strong and beautiful poems have been making a difference in American culture for many years.


Hamill received numerous honors and awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, as well as the First Amendment Award from PEN USA, the Stanley Lindberg Award for lifetime achievement in editing, and two Washington Governor’s Arts Awards, among others.

Hamill served as the editor of Copper Canyon Press from 1972 until 2004. In 2003, he began Poets Against the War, a movement protesting the invasion of Iraq, and edited an anthology of the same name published by Nation Books in 2003. He also served as the director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference for ten years.

Sam Hamill died in Anacortes, Washington, on April 14, 2018.