sam sax
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2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow,
Wallace Stegner Fellow, & Winner of the National Poetry Series! 
bury it, sam sax’s urgent, thriving excavation of desire, is lit with imagery and purpose that surprises and jolts at every turn. Exuberant, wild, tightly knotted mesmerisms of discovery inhabit each poem in this seethe of hunger and sacred toll of toil. A vitalizing and necessary book of poems that dig hard and lift luminously.
—Tyehimba Jess, winner of the Pulitzer Prize & 2017 James Laughlin Award judge Forgive my bluntness, but…Goddamn, sam sax can write some poems. Devastating, comic, inventive, weird, dangerous, smart as hell. —Ross Gay, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award |
sam sax is a queer, jewish, writer & educator.
The author of Madness (Penguin, 2017) winner of The National Poetry Series & ‘Bury It’ (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, sam has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, & the MacDowell Colony. He’s the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems in BuzzFeed, The Nation, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, & other journals. He’s the poetry editor at BOAAT Press & currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. sam is also the recipient of a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Twitter: @samsax1 Instagram: @samsax1 
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These are poems so unapologetically fierce and filthy they are holy. It’s so rare to read words that know they are pushed to the brink, bringing their reader to an edge that didn’t exist before. I’m astonished at the peculiarity and specificity of this poet’s vision—it is a vision that encompasses all the other senses, which gathers and displays the senses it’s quite possible we didn’t have before, or took leave of, or have yet to grow. –Brenda Shaughnessey, Guggenheim Fellow Madness is a wild, resolute book. An exposed, unbridled energy drives its emotional truths while virtuoso technique undergirds its formal and intellectual authority. This is a fine, otherworldly madness. This is an ardent, vulnerable madness. This is an astounding debut. sam sax is an astounding poet. –Terrance Hayes, MacArthur Fellow |