Rachel Hadas

During the height of the AIDS crisis, she led poetry workshops for those afflicted, and edited a number of their works with Charles Barber, experiences that informed her subsequent work. Her translations of writers including Tibullus, Charles Baudelaire, and the Greek poet Konstantinos Karyotakis, have been published to much acclaim. She has taught English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University since 1981, where, as of 2006, she is the Board of Governors Professor of English. Hadas will be teaching at the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place in August, 2021. Hadas lives in New York City and Vermont and is married to the visual artist Shalom Gorewitz. She was married to composer George Edwards until his death in 2011. Hadas has a son, Jonathan Hadas Edwards (born 1984).

The daughter of noted Columbia University classicist Moses Hadas and Latin teacher Elizabeth Chamberlayne Hadas, Hadas grew up in Morningside Heights, New York City. She received a baccalaureate at Radcliffe College in classics, a Master of Arts (1977) at Johns Hopkins University in poetry, and a doctorate at Princeton University in comparative literature (1982). Marrying a man from the island of Samos and living in Greece after her undergraduate work at Radcliffe, Hadas became an intimate of poets James Merrill and Alan Ansen, both of whom strongly influenced her early work, as did Cavafy, whose work she translated, and Seferis.

Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021), and her most recent poetry collection is Love and Dread (Measure Press Inc., 2021). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.