Rachel Hadas

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 Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). 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.

Biography

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).

Living in Greece after her undergraduate work at Radcliffe, Hadas became an intimate of poet James Merrill, a strong influence on her early work. Her subject matter combines her roots in the classics with the intimately personal, with memory and elegy recurring themes throughout her work. Her late husband George Edwards’s illness with early-onset dementia gave rise not only to her 2011 memoir Strange Relation but also to an involvement in the field of medical humanities. During the height of the AIDS crisis, she led poetry workshops for those afflicted, and edited an anthology of poems produced there, Unending Dialogue: Poems from an AIDS Poetry Workshop (1993).

Hadas is also a translator, specializing in Classical Greek and Latin, and has translated the works of Euripides and Nonnus. Her translations of writers including Tibullus, Charles Baudelaire, and the Greek poet Konstantinos Karyotakis, were collected in Other Worlds Than This (1994). Hadas currently serves as Original English Verse Editor of the journal Classical Outlook.

Hadas taught English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University from 1981 to 2023; in 2001 she was named Board of Governors Professor of English. Hadas lives in New York City and Danville Vermont and is married to the visual artist Shalom Gorewitz, with whom she collaborates on poetry and video. She was married to composer George Edwards until his death in 2011. Hadas has a son, Jonathan Hadas Edwards (born 1984), an acupuncturist, herbalist, and writer.

Bibliography

Poetry and prose

Collections

• Ghost Guest, Ragged Sky Press, 2023,
• Pandemic Almanac, Ragged Sky Press, 2022,
• Love and Dread, Measure Press, 2021,
• Piece by Piece, Paul Dry Books, 2021,
• Poems for Camilla, Measure Press, 2018,
• Questions in the Vestibule: Poems, Northwestern University Press, 2016,
• Strange Relation, Paul Dry Books, 2011,
• The Ache of Appetite, Copper Beech Press, 2010,
• River of Forgetfulness, David Robert Books, 2006, ; (WordTech Communications, 2006)
• Laws, University of Nebraska Press, 2004),
• The Double Legacy: Reflections on a Pair of Deaths (Faber & Faber, 1995)
• Mirrors of Astonishment (Rutgers University Press, 1992)
• Living in Time (Rutgers University Press, 1990)
• Pass It On, Princeton University Press, 1989,
• Slow Transparency (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)

Chapbooks

• Starting from Troy (David R. Godine, 1975)
• "Two Poems" (Dim Gray Bar Press, 2000)

Translations

• Tales of Dionysus, University of Michigan Press, 2022
• The Iphigenia Plays of Euripides, Northwestern University Press 2018,
• Other Worlds Than This, Rutgers University Press, 1994

Anthologies edited

• The Waiting Room Reader II, CavanKerry Press, 2013,
• The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (W.W. Norton, 2010; Eds., Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley, Karen Van Dyck)
• Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop (Ed. with Charles Barber, Faber & Faber, 1991)

Essay collections

• Classics: Essays (Textos Books, 2007)
• Merrill, Cavafy, Poems, and Dreams (University of Michigan Press, 2000)

Sources

• Library of Congress Online Catalog > Rachel Hadas

External links

• RachelHadas.net Author Website
• Audio Reading: Rachel Hadas reads from Euripedes' poem Helen
• Audio Reading: Rachel Hadas reads a poem by Sappho
• Contemporary Poetry Review > 2009 > Interview: The CPR Interview: Rachel Hadas