Sharon Dolin was born and raised in Brooklyn. A Fulbright Scholar to Italy, she holds a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University and an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. Dolin has been awarded the distinguished 2013 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, selected by the Poet Laureate of the U.S., Natasha Trethewey. In 2022, her book of translations Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
She is the author of seven books of poetry: Imperfect Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022); Manual for Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016); Whirlwind (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); Burn and Dodge (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), selected by Bob Hicok for the 2007 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry; Realm of the Possible (Four Way Books, 2004); Serious Pink (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003); and Heart Work (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1995). At MacDowell in 2017, she completed revisions on her translations from the Catalan of Gemma Gorga's book of prose poems Book of Minutes (Libre dels minuts), which was published in the Field Translation Series (Oberlin College Press, 2019), and for which she received a 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant and a grant from Institut Ramon Llull. She also made considerable progress on translating Gorga's 2015 volume of verse MUR from Catalan and drafted her own poems for a new ekphrastic series based on the work of Catalan painter Lita Cabellut. In 2021, she received a fellowship from the NEA in Translation as well as the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize for the publication of Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga (Saturnalia Books, 2021). At MacDowell in 2021, she completed work on her manuscript of poems, Imperfect Present.
In addition, she has published five chapbooks: Entreaty to Indecision (The Center for Book Arts, letterpress, 2006), The Seagull, (The Center for Book Arts, letterpress, 2001), Mistakes (Poetry New York Pamphlet Series, 1999), Climbing Mount Sinai (Dim Gray Bar Press, letterpress, 1996), and Mind Lag, (Turtle Watch Press, 1982). She has poems featured in numerous anthologies and has been writer-in-residence at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts and a visiting professor of creative writing at Hofstra University. She has also taught at New York University, Adelphi University, The Cooper Union, and Poets House. For 20 years she taught poetry workshops at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y and directed the Center for Book Arts Annual Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Competition in New York City.
Dolin now directs and teaches in the semi-annual poetry workshop Writing About Art in Barcelona and is associate editor at Barrow Street Press.
