Sandra Simonds
English Professor
Biography
Sandra Simonds is an American poet, critic and novelist. The author of eight books of poetry, her poems have been included in Best American Poetry and have appeared in literary journals including Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Granta, Boston Review, and Fence. Her collection Mother Was a Tragic Girl won the Cleveland State University Open Poetry Competition and her collection Further Problems with Pleasure won the University of Akron Poetry Prize. In 2013, she won a Readers’ Choice Award for her sonnet “Red Wand.” Her poetry reviews have been featured on the Poetry Foundation Website, the New York Times, the Harvard Review and the Kenyon Review. Simonds earned her Ph.D. in English and Poetry from Florida State University. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida, and is a full professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and much of my work deals with intergenerational trauma.
Published Works
Poetry
Triptychs (Wave Books, 2022)
Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019)
Orlando (Wave Books, 2018)
Further Problems with Pleasure (University of Akron Press, 2017)
Steal it Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015)
The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014)
Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012)
Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009)
Prose
Assia (Noemi Press, 2023)
Links to Sample Works
- Poetry Foundation, “When you think about, mostly, a cage is air…”
- New Yorker, “April”
- Boston Review, “Cassandra Data”
