Poet, essayist, and translator Rachel Hadas is the author of many books of poetry, including, most recently, Ghost Guest (2023) and Pandemic Almanac (2022), both from Ragged Sky Press. A selection of her essays and criticism, Piece by Piece, was published by Paul Dry Books in 2021. Her newest collection of poems, Forty-four Pastorals is forthcoming from Measure Press later this year, and a prosimetrum (alternating poetry and prose) entitled From Which We Start Awake, is due out in 2025 from Able Muse Press. Her poem "Voyage" is included in the 2024 edition of The Best American Poetry anthology, edited by Mary Jo Salter.

 

Hadas is one of some forty translators of the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, an epic from late antiquity published by the University Press of Michigan in 2022 as Tales of Dionysus; she has also translated three plays by Euripides. As an editor and critic, she is particularly interested in medical humanities and translations from the classics in addition to poetry; she currently serves as Original English Verse Editor for Classical Outlook.

 

Hadas taught English at Rutgers University-Newark from 1981 to 2023, and was named a Board of Governors Professor in 2001. She has also taught courses in literature and writing at Columbia and Princeton Universities, the Ninety-second Street Y, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the West Chester Poetry Conference, and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. 

 

Hadas’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award in literature from the Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters.  She is a recipient of the O.B. Hardison Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library and has been a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has been a resident of the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. 

 

Rachel Hadas lives in New York City and in Danville, Vermont. With her husband, visual artist and filmmaker Shalom Gorewitz, she has been collaborating on poetry and video.

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