Sharon Olds was born in 1942, in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her first book, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Father was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in England. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helps run the New York University workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York.

Sharon Olds is the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998-2000.