Sophie Cabot Black (she/her) is the author of four collections of poetry Geometry of the Restless Herd, The Exchange, The Descent, the Connecticut Book Award winner, and The Misunderstanding of Nature, the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award winner. Black has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Provincetown's Fine Arts Center, and the Radcliffe Institute as well as prizes including the Grolier Poetry Prize, John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Emerging Poets Award from Judith's Room. She was also recognized as a Lambda Literary finalist. Her work can be found in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Black has taught at the New School, Rutgers, and Columbia University, and she currently teaches creative writing at the 92nd St Y and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She divides her time between New York, Connecticut, and Colorado.

Praise for Geometry of the Restless Herd

"Black lays out a measured exploration of recent politics and inner turmoil in her latest collection. The poems vary from philosophical arguments to allegory rooted in a plot of farmland. In tight stanzas Black carefully frames her imagery. . . . Much like a moving and ferocious natural landscape, Black's poems stir a progression of observations and emotions."--Michael Ruzicka, Booklist

Praise for Sophie Cabot Black

"[Sophie Cabot Black has] concocted a way of speaking in poetry that's very fresh and daring." --Billy Collins, The New York Times

"Cabot has a gift for abstracting the familiar in an effort to recapture memory, skillfully using negation to suspend sense... In these poems Black weaves sheer elegance and devastating knowing." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"These poems remind us of the ways we each pass through the stations of a life. In doing this, they capture the wonder of trying to inhabit life's shapes at all... With precision, Black's poems skirt great mysteries." --NPR, "All Things Considered"

"The poems in The Exchange... are emphatically alive. This fierce energy breathes life back into the hopeless soul .... " --Huffington Post

"Black's voice is startling, jagged and implacable, and The Descent is steep, precipitous and dazzling-all the way down from a hard-earned heaven." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Black is a passionate and breathlessly forceful writer... The Misunderstanding of Nature is a distinguished collection, one of the liveliest first books in years." --Poetry

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Pub date: 2024-05-07

Length: 72 pages