Saskia Hamilton

Maria Saskia Hamilton was born in Washington, D.C., on May 5, 1967, to Elise Wiarda and John Andrew Hamilton Jr. When Saskia was 12, her father re-married to Eliza Euretta Rathbone, an assistant curator at the National Gallery of Art at the time, later the chief curator of The Phillips Collection, and the daughter of Perry T. Rathbone. Hamilton stated that she grew up listening to poetry read by her father and grandmother, and started writing poetry seriously when she was about 18. ==Education and career==

Hamilton graduated from Kenyon College with a B.A. in 1989. Soon after graduating, her work closed out the collection The Kenyon Poets: Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of The Kenyon Review, a compilation of poetry in honor of The Kenyon Review. That year, Hamilton was the winner of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Sponsored by Ruth Lilly, the fellowship included a prize. She used the fellowship to attend New York University, where she earned her M.A. in English and creative writing, graduating in 1991. From there, Hamilton worked at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., from 1992 to 1997. before moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1999. She spent a year teaching at Kenyon College from 2000 to 2001. She stated that the collection was "partially about watching people deal with illness and death in families, and dealing with the moment of death." The book was well received. Andrew Motion writing for The Guardian said, "Her selection, as far as one can judge, is excellent: it certainly gives a rounded picture of a marvellously jagged mind. [...] Best of all, her approach throughout is enthusiastic, as well as scholarly, and lets us see that even if Lowell wrote his letters in a way that's almost opposite to the way he wrote his poems (freely, and with hardly any revision), they nevertheless meet in a single concentration." That year, she also published two collections of her poetry: Divide These and Canal: New & Selected Poems, the latter of which featured some poems from her previous two collections and some new works. Hamilton was a judge for the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2012, she became co-editor for the journal Literary Imagination. In 2014, Hamilton published her fourth collection of poetry, Corridor. David Orr writing for The New York Times and Dan Chiasson writing for The New Yorker both listed the book as one their top poetry books of the year. Hamilton became Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Curriculum at Barnard College in July 2018. The next month, she joined The Paris Review as an advisory editor. The books jointly earned her the 2020 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation ==Personal life and death==

Hamilton's name is the title of the tenth track of the 2010 Ben Folds and Nick Hornby collaborative album Lonely Avenue; the song's lyrics are the thoughts of a character who has become obsessed with her based only on the sound of her name. She first met Folds and Hornby after the album's release, when she attended a performance at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in Lower Manhattan in October 2010. Hamilton died in Manhattan on June 7, 2023, at age 56, from cancer. She had a son. ==Works==

Poetry collections • As for Dream: Poems (2001), Graywolf Press, • Divide These: Poems (2005), Graywolf Press, • Canal: New & Selected Poems 1993-2005 (2005), Arc Publications, • Corridor: Poems (2014), Graywolf Press, • All Souls: Poems (2023), Graywolf Press, As editor • The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005), Ed. by Saskia Hamilton, Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, • Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008), Ed. by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton, Published by Macmillan, • Poems / Prose (2011), By Elizabeth Bishop, Ed. by Saskia Hamilton, Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, • The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle (2019), By Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, Ed. by Saskia Hamilton, Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, • The Dolphin, Two Versions: 1972, 1973 (2019), By Robert Lowell, Ed. by Saskia Hamilton, Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, • Memories of Our Childhood in Wartime Amsterdam 1940-1945 (2022), By Claar Hugenholtz-Wiarda, Louise van Wassenaer-Wiarda, and Elise Wiarda, Ed. by Saskia Hamilton, Self-published, As contributor • The Kenyon Poets: Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of The Kenyon Review (1989), Ed. by Galbraith M. Crump, ==Awards==

• 1989 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation • National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship • 2020 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation • 2021 Arts and Letters Awards in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters • 2021 Morton N. Cohen Award from The Modern Language Association ==References==