My Poem Without Me In It by Sharon Olds (Grade 10+)

Sharon Olds is the winner of countless major prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, and her books have been bestsellers throughout her career. Her work is known for its candor, and emotional power. Olds often draws from her own life, mining personal and intimate details about her children, her parents, and her romances. Olds herself maintains that she doesn’t want to “ask a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets.” She was born in San Francisco but grew up in Berkeley California, where she was raised as a strict Calvinist. Olds currently teaches in the graduate writing program at New York University.