Yerra Sugarman
Biography
Yerra Sugarman is the author of three full-length volumes of poetry: Aunt Bird (Four Way Books, February 2022); The Bag of Broken Glass (Sheep Meadow Press, 2008), poems from which received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow Press, 2002), which won PEN American Center’s PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. Her chapbook From Her Lips Like Steam was published by the Aureole Press at the University of Toledo in December 2019.
Other honors she has earned include a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, a Canada Council for the Arts Grant for Creative Writers, the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award and Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, a Chicago Literary Award, and a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Award.
Her poems, articles, and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, The Nation, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, and elsewhere.
She has taught creative writing and literature at the University of Toledo, the University of Houston, Rutgers University, the City College of New York, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, and at New York University. She earned an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. A daughter of Holocaust survivors, she was born in Toronto, and lives in New York City. She is the Secretary of Yetzirah’s Board of Directors.
Published Works
- Aunt Bird (Four Way Books, 2022)
- From Her Lips Like Steam (Aureole Press at the University of Toledo, 2019)
- The Bag of Broken Glass (Sheep Meadow Press, 2008)
- Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow Press, 2002)
Links to Sample Works
- Image, “Silence Pares My Lips”
- New Orleans Review, “[It is just before the war cracks the land open like an egg.]”
- On the Seawall, “This Lviv”
- Four Way Books, “An Essay on Celia Dropkin and Four Poems translated from Yiddish”
