in English in 1972 from Columbia University. She teaches creative writing at New York University. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on "Emerson's Prosody," because she appreciated the way he defied convention. Personal life On March 23, 1968, she married Dr. David Douglas Olds in New York City and, in 1969, gave birth to the first of their two children. In 1997, after 29 years of marriage, they divorced, and Olds moved to New Hampshire, though she commutes to New York three days a week. There, she lives in the same Upper West Side apartment she has lived in for the past 40 years while working as a Professor at New York University. In New Hampshire she lives in Graylag Cabins in Pittsfield. Her partner, Carl Wallman, is a former cattle breeder. In 2005, First Lady Laura Bush invited Olds to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Olds declined the invitation and responded with an open letter published in The Nation. The editors suggested others follow her example. She concluded her letter by explaining: "So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it." Poetry Following her Ph.D., Olds let go of an attachment to what she thought she knew about poetic convention and began to write about her family, abuse, and sex, focusing on the work and not the audience. Olds has said that she is more informed by the work of poets such as Galway Kinnell, Muriel Rukeyser and Gwendolyn Brooks than by confessional poets like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath. Plath, she comments "was a great genius, with an IQ of at least double mine" and while these women charted well the way of women in the world she says "their steps were not steps I wanted to put my feet in." When Olds first sent her poetry to a literary magazine she received a reply saying, "This is a literary magazine. If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest the Ladies' Home Journal. The true subjects of poetry are … male subjects, not your children." Olds eventually published her first collection, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of 37. Satan Says sets