Beck Series: sam sax

The Beck Series welcomes poet sam sax. sax is a queer, Jewish writer and educator. They’re the author of Madness, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Bury It, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They’re next book of poetry is Pig (Simon & Schuster, 2023). A two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion, they have poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Granta, and elsewhere. sax has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, Lambda Lit, and MacDowell, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University.

In an interview, sax was asked about what topics interest them most. They responded, “My work is deeply invested in Jewish storytelling, culture, language, and my family’s history. My work attempts to recontextualize us as a historically diasporic people, who’ve become beautiful through our movement and adaptation. Exile is a tricky word for me. Exile for some reason rings of the desire to return, of entitlement to land, to birthright, which led to the creation of that violent settler colonial nation-state. My work instead revels in estrangement, in the strange; it wants to live in what’s queer about being Jewish.”