Sam Sax (poet)

Sam Sax
Sam Sax performing at AWP Conference & Bookfair 2025
Sax at the 2025 AWP Conference
Alma mater
Occupations
  • Poet
  • novelist
  • educator
Writing career
Notable works
  • bury it
  • Yr Dead
Notable awards

Sam Sax (stylized in all lowercase) is a queer Jewish American poet and novelist. They are the author of three poetry collections, Madness, bury it, and Pig, and the novel Yr Dead.[1][2] bury it received the James Laughlin Award, and Yr Dead was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction.[2][3]

Education and career

Sax earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin.[1] In 2015, they received a creative writing fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.[4] In 2018, Sax was named a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.[5] Sax is a former Stegner Fellow and has been a lecturer in the ITALIC program at Stanford University.[6]

Poetry

Before publishing a full-length collection, Sax published several chapbooks, including A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters, Sad Boy / Detective, Straight, and All the Rage.[4][7][8][9]

Sax's first full-length collection, Madness, was published by Penguin Books in 2017 after it was selected by Terrance Hayes for the National Poetry Series.[10][11] Publishers Weekly described the collection as addressing mental health, family, the Holocaust, and the AIDS crisis, while noting that some poems could lose focus.[12] In the San Francisco Chronicle, Diana Whitney wrote that the collection uses the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to examine medical and social classifications of sexuality and sanity.[13]

Sax's second collection, bury it, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2018.[14] The collection received the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.[15] Maya Phillips, reviewing the collection for the Academy of American Poets, discussed its treatment of queerness, violence, grief, and recurring bridge imagery.[16] Publishers Weekly noted the book's attention to sound and wordplay.[17]

Sax's third collection, Pig, was published by Scribner in 2023.[18] Publishers Weekly described the book as using the pig as both subject and object while addressing queerness, beauty, capitalism, and the body.[19] Vulture included Pig in its list of the best books of 2023.[20] Pig was a finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Poetry.[21]

Fiction

Sax's debut novel, Yr Dead, was published by McSweeney's in 2024.[22] The novel was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction.[3][23]

Kirkus Reviews described Yr Dead as a language- and image-driven novel.[24] In The Observer, Miriam Balanescu wrote that the novel is a non-chronological account of its protagonist's life and that its formal experimentation was one of its strengths, while also finding that the book sometimes tried to cover too much.[25] In The New Yorker, Doreen St. Félix discussed the novel in an essay on self-immolation in contemporary culture.[26]

Works

Poetry collections

  • Madness. Penguin Books. 2017. ISBN 9780143131700.[10]
  • bury it. Wesleyan University Press. 2018. ISBN 9780819577313.[14]
  • Pig. Scribner. 2023. ISBN 9781668019993.[18]

Poetry chapbooks

  • A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters. Button Poetry. 2014.[4]
  • Sad Boy / Detective. Black Lawrence Press. 2015.[7]
  • Straight. Diode Editions. 2016. ISBN 9781939728074.[8]
  • All the Rage. Sibling Rivalry Press. 2016. ISBN 9781943977178.[9]

Fiction

  • Yr Dead. McSweeney's. 2024. ISBN 9781952119996.[22]

References

  1. 1 2 "sam sax". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  2. 1 2 "About Sam Sax". Academy of American Poets. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  3. 1 2 "Yr Dead". National Book Foundation. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 "Sam Sax". National Endowment for the Arts. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  5. ↑ "Poetry Foundation Announces 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships". Poetry Foundation. August 28, 2018. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  6. ↑ "Sam Sax's Profile". Stanford Profiles. Stanford University. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  7. 1 2 "Sam Sax". Black Lawrence Press. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  8. 1 2 "STRAIGHT by sam sax". Diode Editions. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  9. 1 2 "All the Rage by sam sax". Sibling Rivalry Press. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  10. 1 2 "Madness by Sam Sax". Penguin Random House. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  11. ↑ "Madness". National Poetry Series. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  12. ↑ "Madness". Publishers Weekly. September 18, 2017. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  13. ↑ Whitney, Diana (November 7, 2017). "Poetry by sam sax, Stephanie Burt and Gabrielle Calvocoressi". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved April 25, 2026 – via SFGate.
  14. 1 2 "bury it". Wesleyan University Press. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  15. ↑ "Bury It". Academy of American Poets. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  16. ↑ Phillips, Maya (2018). "Bury It". Academy of American Poets. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  17. ↑ "Bury It". Publishers Weekly. August 20, 2018. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  18. 1 2 "Pig". Simon & Schuster. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  19. ↑ "Pig". Publishers Weekly. July 10, 2023. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  20. ↑ Kreizman, Maris (December 5, 2023). "The Best Books of 2023". Vulture. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  21. ↑ "Announcing the Finalists for the 36th Annual Lammy Awards". Lambda Literary. March 27, 2024. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  22. 1 2 "Yr Dead". McSweeney's. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  23. ↑ "2024 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction". National Book Foundation. September 2024. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  24. ↑ "Yr Dead". Kirkus Reviews. May 17, 2024. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
  25. ↑ Balanescu, Miriam (August 18, 2024). "Yr Dead by Sam Sax review – comedy and darkness in an inventive debut novel". The Observer. Retrieved April 25, 2026 – via The Guardian.
  26. ↑ St. Félix, Doreen (January 19, 2026). "Acts of Self-Destruction". The New Yorker. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
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