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), and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, 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.

Biography

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). Living in Greece after her undergraduate work at Radcliffe, Hadas became an intimate of poet James Merrill, a strong influence on her early work. Her subject matter combines her roots in the classics with the intimately personal, with memory and elegy recurring themes throughout her work. 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. 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). Hadas is also a translator, specializing in Classical Greek and Latin, and has translated the works of Euripides and Nonnus. Her translations of writers including Tibullus, Charles Baudelaire, and the Greek poet Konstantinos Karyotakis, were collected in Other Worlds Than This (1994). 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. 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. She was married to composer George Edwards until his death in 2011. Hadas has a son, Jonathan Hadas Edwards (born 1984), an acupuncturist, herbalist, and writer.

Poetry and Prose

Translations

Anthologies edited

Essay collections

Memoirs

Sources