Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021), [1] and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). [2] [3] Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, [4] the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. [5]
The daughter of noted Columbia University classicist Moses Hadas and Latin teacher Elizabeth Chamberlayne Hadas, Hadas grew up in Morningside Heights, New York City. She received a baccalaureate at Radcliffe College in classics, a Master of Arts (1977) at Johns Hopkins University in poetry, and a doctorate at Princeton University in comparative literature (1982). [5]
Living in Greece after her undergraduate work at Radcliffe, Hadas became an intimate of poet James Merrill, a strong influence on her early work. [5] [6] Her subject matter combines her roots in the classics with the intimately personal, with memory and elegy recurring themes throughout her work. [5] Her late husband George Edwards’s illness with early-onset dementia gave rise not only to her 2011 memoir Strange Relation but also to an involvement in the field of medical humanities. [7] [8] During the height of the AIDS crisis, she led poetry workshops for those afflicted, and edited an anthology of poems produced there, Unending Dialogue: Poems from an AIDS Poetry Workshop (1993). [9]
Hadas is also a translator, specializing in Classical Greek and Latin, and has translated the works of Euripides and Nonnus. [10] [11] [12] Her translations of writers including Tibullus, Charles Baudelaire, and the Greek poet Konstantinos Karyotakis, were collected in Other Worlds Than This (1994). [13] Hadas currently serves as Original English Verse Editor of the journal Classical Outlook.
Hadas taught English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University from 1981 to 2023; in 2001 she was named Board of Governors Professor of English. [14] Hadas lives in New York City and Danville Vermont and is married to the visual artist Shalom Gorewitz, with whom she collaborates on poetry and video. [15] [16] [17] She was married to composer George Edwards until his death in 2011. [18] Hadas has a son, Jonathan Hadas Edwards (born 1984), an acupuncturist, herbalist, and writer. [19] [17]