Authors Like Sharon Olds

Sylvia Plath

American · The Colossus (1960), The Bell Jar (1963), Ariel (1965)

Plath was born in Boston in 1932, married the English poet Ted Hughes and died by suicide in London in 1963, aged 30. Ariel, published two years later, includes “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”, and her Collected Poems won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize, the first awarded posthumously for poetry.

Every book by Sylvia Plath →

Lucille Clifton

American · Good Woman (1987), Blessing the Boats (2000)

Clifton was born in Depew, New York, in 1936 and died in 2010. Her short, lower-case poems, such as “homage to my hips”, celebrate the Black female body, and she wrote just as directly about family history, illness and abuse. Blessing the Boats won the National Book Award.

Marie Howe

American · What the Living Do (1997), The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008)

Howe grew up in Rochester, New York, one of nine children. What the Living Do is an elegy for her brother John, who died of an AIDS-related illness, written in plain, conversational lines. She served as New York State Poet from 2012 to 2014.

Walt Whitman

American · Leaves of Grass (1855)

Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense in 1855 and kept revising and expanding it until his death in 1892. Poems such as “I Sing the Body Electric” praised the body and sexuality so openly that the 1882 edition was threatened with prosecution for obscenity in Boston.

Every book by Walt Whitman →

Louise Glück

American · Ararat (1990), The Wild Iris (1992), Meadowlands (1996)

Glück won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020; she died in 2023. Ararat deals with her father's death and her family, and Meadowlands with the end of a marriage, both in a cool, pared-down voice.

Every book by Louise Glück →

Carol Ann Duffy

British · Mean Time (1993), The World's Wife (1999), Rapture (2005)

Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955 and served as UK Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2019, the first woman in the post. The World's Wife gives voice to the wives of famous men, from Mrs Midas to Mrs Darwin, and Rapture, a sequence following a love affair from beginning to end, won the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Warsan Shire

British-Somali · Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011), Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (2022)

Shire was born in Nairobi to Somali parents and grew up in London. Her poems about migration, family and women's bodies became widely known through her poem “Home” and her writing for Beyoncé's visual album Lemonade (2016). Bless the Daughter was her first full-length collection.

Ocean Vuong

Vietnamese-American · Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019), The Emperor of Gladness (2025)

Vuong was born in Saigon in 1988 and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. Night Sky with Exit Wounds, poems about his family, the Vietnam War and desire, won the T. S. Eliot Prize. His first novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, is written as a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read it.

Every book by Ocean Vuong →

Ada Limón

American · Bright Dead Things (2015), The Carrying (2018), The Hurting Kind (2022)

Limón served as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States from 2022 to 2025. The Carrying, which includes poems about infertility and the body, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.

Kim Addonizio

American · Tell Me (2000), What Is This Thing Called Love (2004)

Addonizio is a poet and novelist born in Washington, DC, whose poems deal frankly with sex, drinking, desire and loss. Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award.