photo: Chip Simons

Rachel Hadas

Rachel Hadas is the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and translations, most recently The River of Forgetfulness (Wordtech Communications, 2006); Laws (2004); Indelible (2001); Halfway Down the Hall: New & Selected Poems (1998), which was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Empty Bed (1995); The Double Legacy (1995); Mirrors of Astonishment (1992); and Living in Time (1990).

Hadas studied classics at Harvard University, poetry at Johns Hopkins, and comparative literature at Princeton University. She spent four years in Greece between college and graduate school, an experience that surfaces variously in much of her work.

Since 1981 she has taught in the English Department of the Newark, New Jersey campus of Rutgers University, and has taught occasional courses in literature and writing at both Columbia and Princeton. She has also served as faculty of the Sewanee Writers'Conference.

About Hadas's work, the poet Grace Schulman has written, "The poems are urgent, contemplative, and finely wrought. In them, antiquity illuminates the present as Rachel Hadas finds in ordinary human acts 'what never was and what is eternal.'"

Among her honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

She lives in New York City.