About

Yerra Sugarman is an American poet, essayist, and teacher. Born in Canada, she lives in New York City.

She is the author of three poetry collections: Forms of Gone, which was a National Book Critics Circle “Favorite First Book” and was awarded PEN American Center’s PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award; The Bag of Broken Glass, which was a National Book Critics Circle “Recommended Book”; and, most recently, Aunt Bird, a hybrid collection comprised of lyric poems, prose poems, and lyric essays published by Four Way Books. Aunt Bird was the winner of the American Book Fest’s 2022 Best Books Awards in the category of General Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards in Poetry. Her chapbook From Her Lips Like Steam was published by the Aureole Press at the University of Toledo in December 2019.

Her poetry, translations, personal essays, and critical articles have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Bat City Review, Cherry Tree, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, The Nation, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Literary Imagination, The Mississippi Review, Pleiades, New England Review, The Bellevue Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry International, On the Seawall, among other journals.

She earned a B.F.A. in Visual Art from Concordia University in Montreal, an M.F.A. in Painting from Columbia University, an M.A. in Creative Writing from The City College of New York, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston.

She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, PEN American Center’s PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award and its Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, a Canada Council Grant for Creative Writers, a Chicago Literary Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and an American Book Fest prize.

She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and grew up in a community of survivors in Toronto.

She has taught at the University of Houston, Rutger’s University, New York University, The City College of New York, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, and at the University of Toledo in Ohio. She currently teaches poetry privately.