Living in Greece after her undergraduate work at Radcliffe, Hadas became an intimate of poet James Merrill, a strong influence on her early work.[5][6] Her subject matter combines her roots in the classics with the intimately personal, with memory and elegy recurring themes throughout her work.[5] 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.[7][8] 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).[9]
Hadas is also a translator, specializing in Classical Greek and Latin, and has translated the works of Euripides and Nonnus.[10][11][12] Her translations of writers including Tibullus, Charles Baudelaire, and the Greek poet Konstantinos Karyotakis, were collected in Other Worlds Than This (1994).[13] 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.[14] 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.[15][16][17] She was married to composer George Edwards until his death in 2011.[18] Hadas has a son, Jonathan Hadas Edwards (born 1984), an acupuncturist, herbalist, and writer.[19][17]
Bibliographyedit
Poetry and Proseedit
Collections
Ghost Guest, Ragged Sky Press, 2023, ISBN 978-1-933974-52-1
Pandemic Almanac, Ragged Sky Press, 2022, ISBN 978-1933974453
Love and Dread, Measure Press, 2021, ISBN 978-1939574329
Piece by Piece, Paul Dry Books, 2021, ISBN 9781589881556
Poems for Camilla, Measure Press, 2018, ISBN 1939574250