Sam Sax is an American poet, novelist and educator who came up through spoken word and twice won the Bay Area Grand Slam. They studied at Oberlin College and earned an MFA in poetry at the University of Texas at Austin. Fellowships followed from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Lambda Literary, MacDowell and Yaddo.
Sax writes about queerness, Jewish identity and inheritance, mental illness, grief and the body. The poems are often performed first and printed second, and they carry that rhythm. Pig, from 2023, uses the animal as both subject and object to take on desire, beauty and capitalism. Their fiction keeps the poet's habits: it is built from short, associative pieces rather than a straight plot.
Madness (Penguin, 2017) won the National Poetry Series, chosen by Terrance Hayes. Bury It (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Pig was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Yr Dead, their first novel, came out from McSweeney's in August 2024 and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. It later won a 2025 IPPY Award for literary fiction.
Start with Yr Dead. It takes place in the moments between Ezra, a queer Jewish twenty-something, setting themself on fire outside Trump Tower in 2016 and dying. In that time the book moves through childhood burns, family history and the wider world. The subject is self-immolation, which readers should know going in. If the novel's fragmented voice suits you, go to Bury It or Pig for the poems.
