EUGENE–Sharon Olds, a poet well known for her intensely powerful work, will give a reading on Thursday, May 17, as the Creative Writing Program’s annual Walter and Nancy Kidd Tutorial Program distinguished visiting writer.

Olds’ free public reading, which will follow a presentation of this year’s winners of the Kidd undergraduate writing contest, will begin at 8 p.m. in the Alumni Lounge of Gerlinger Hall,
1468 University St. A booksigning will follow.

Olds, the former New York State Poet Laureate, served as final judge of the poetry contest while novelist Grace Talusan served as final judge of the fiction contest. The Kidd writing contest is open to all undergraduates at the University of Oregon. Winners will receive a cash prize.

The author of seven collections of poetry, including the recently published "Blood, Tin, Straw," Olds won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lamont Poetry Prize for her 1984 volume, "The Living and the Dead."

Olds’ poetry is often hailed for its vision.

"Like Whitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression," wrote a New York Times reviewer.

Critics also often praise her poems for their power and their language as they unflinchingly explore sexual abuse and link it with overt political oppression.

A reviewer for the Iowa Review wrote: "What makes these poems gripping is not only their humanity, the recognizable and plausibly complex rendering of character and representative episode, but their language–direct, down to earth, immersed in the essential implements and processes of daily living."

Olds is a native Californian who earned her doctorate from Columbia University. She is a founding chair of the Writing Program at Goldwater Hospital for the severely physically disabled and currently teaches in New York University’s Creative Writing Program.

Of Olds’ poetry, David Leavitt, writing for the Voice Literary Supplement, commented that "Sharon Olds is enormously self-aware; her poetry is remarkable for its candor, its eroticism, and its power to move."

"Sharon Olds’ poems are pure fire in the hands–risky, on the verge of failing, and in the end leaping up," says And writer Michael Ondaatje. "I love the roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss."

Olds’ UO reading is made possible, in part, through the generous support of the College of Arts and Sciences and is co-sponsored by both the Oregon Humanities Center and the UO Office of Academic Affairs.

For more information, call the UO Creative Writing Program, (541) 346-0544.

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