Sam Sax

Sam Sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator. They are the author of Pig (Scribner, 2023); Bury It (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), which received the 2017 James Laughlin Award; and Madness (Penguin Books, 2017), winner of the National Poetry Series. They are also the author of the novel, Yr Dead (McSweeney’s, 2024). 

Of Sax’s work, James Laughlin Award judge Tyehimba Jess writes,

Bury It, Sam Sax’s urgent, thriving excavation of desire, is lit with imagery and purpose that surprises and jolts at every turn. Exuberant, wild, tightly knotted mesmerisms of discovery inhabit each poem in this seethe of hunger and sacred toll of toil. A vitalizing and necessary book of poems that dig hard and lift luminously.

Sax has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Lambda Literary, MacDowell, Stanford University, and Yaddo. They are also the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion. 

Sax has served as the poetry editor at BOAAT Press, and they are currently serving as a lecturer in the ITALIC program at Stanford University.