Sam Hamill

Biography

Sam Hamill is an american poet and the co-founder of Copper Canyon Press along with Bill O’Daly and Tree Swenson.He is also the initiator of the Poets Against War movement (2003). Hamill is also the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Destination Zero: Poems 1970–1995 (1995), Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems and Translations (2005), and Measured by Stone (2007). Influenced by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, and Hayden Carruth, Hamill “presents a model of honest, consistent, undisguised political engagement: he articulates not only a vision of peace with justice, not only his relish for work to achieve that vision, but his sense of the role that poetry can play,” as Publishers Weekly noted in its review of Measured by Stone. Hamill has also published several collections of essays and numerous translations, including Crossing the Yellow River: 300 Poems from the Chinese (2000). Hamill’s own poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

When First Lady Laura Bush invited Hamill to a 2003 White House symposium on poetry, he declined in protest of the impending war in Iraq, and instead launched the website poetsagainstthewar.org, an online anthology that has collected over 20,000 poems of protest and spawned an international movement. Hamill edited a collection of poems from the website, Poets Against the War (2003). Responding to critics who doubted the place of politics in poetry, Hamill noted in a 2006 interview, “You can’t write about character and the human condition and be apolitical—that’s not the kind of world we’ve ever lived in.”

Hamill has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Mellon Fund, and has won the Stanley Lindberg Lifetime Achievement Award for Editing and the Washington Poets Association Lifetime Achievement Award.