Photo Credit: Kira Derryberry

Sandra Simonds

b. 1977

Current City, State, Country

Tallahassee, Florida, USA

Birth City, State, Country

Washington D.C., USA

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)

Author Site

Links to Sample Works

Video Reading

Current Title

English Professor

Education

University of California, B.A., English and Psychology, 2000
University of Montana, M.F.A. Creative Writing, 2003
Florida State University, Ph.D., English/Creative Writing, 2010

Subject Matter

Genre