Sophie Cabot Black

Sophie Cabot Black’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Bomb, The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Tin House, among other journals. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, among them Best American Poetry, Fatherhood, Doggerel, and Poems About Horses, anthologies from the Everyman’s Library Series.

Her three books from Graywolf Press are The Misunderstanding of Nature, which received the Norma Farber Book Award from the Poetry Society of America,  The Descent, which earned the Connecticut Book Award and was nominated for the 2005 Colorado Book Award, and The Exchange, of which Publisher’s Weekly said: “Black weaves sheer elegance and devastating knowing” (starred review).

And of her newest collection, Geometry of the Restless Herd (Copper Canyon), Publisher’s Weekly said: “”Cabot Black’s stunning, fable-like fourth collection urges readers, ‘do not expect the known; you were not there.’ This unusual and poignant volume is equal parts gothic and pastoral, full of incisively written imagery characterized by sparse stanzas that allow each line to shine. . . . The poems in this collection run no risk of being mistaken for another poet’s oeuvre. Singular and striking in their movements and tone, they are a testament to delicate beauty. Cabot Black walks the tightrope between the gnomic and the visceral, and sticks the landing with the utmost skill and tenderness.”—(starred review)

She has been awarded several fellowships, including at the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute, and appears at national literary festivals such as the Los Angeles Times Book Festival and the Dodge Poetry Festival.

Black has taught at the New School, Rutgers, and Columbia University. She holds degrees from Marlboro College and Columbia University.

Of her work NPR has called her “a poet’s poet”; Billy Collins has said,  “she has concocted a way of speaking in poetry that’s very fresh and daring”, and from the Library Journal: “lovely work for many readers; surely even those who don’t typically read poetry will find understanding here”.

She has also published several essays, translated poems, and more recently finished two song cycles and a libretto.

She was born in New York City, the daughter of a Broadway producer and an opera producer, raised on a small farm in New England, and currently divides her time between New England, New York, and Colorado.