Sam Hamill

Sam Hamill (May 9, 1943 – April 14, 2018) was an American poet and the co-founder of Copper Canyon Press^[1] along with Bill O’Daly and Tree Swenson. He also initiated the Poets Against War movement (2003) in response to the Iraq War.^[2] In 2003 he did a poetic tour in Italy, organised by writer Alessandro Agostinelli. After that tour Hamill published his first Italian book A Pisan Canto - Un canto pisano.

Hamill was awarded the Stanley Lindberg Lifetime Achievement Award for Editing and the Washington Poets Association Lifetime Achievement Award.^[3]

Hamill's 2014 book Habitation: Collected Poems,^[4] presents some of Hamill's best poems spanning a career of over 40 years.^[5]

At the time of his death from complications of COPD in 2018, his final poetry collection After Morning Rain was about to be published.^[6]

Poetry Books

• Gratitude: Poems [BOA Editions, Ltd. Rochester NY, 1988]
• Facing Snow: Visions of Tu Fu [White Pine Press, 1988] (Sam Hamill, translator)
• Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred T'ang Poems [Tiger Bark Press, 2013] (Sam Hamill, translator)
• Destination Zero: Poems 1970–1995 (1995).
• The Gift of Tongues: Twenty-Five Years of Poetry from Copper Canyon Press (1996, Copper Canyon Press)(Sam Hamill, editor)
• Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems and Translations (2005).
• Measured by Stone (2007).
• A Pisan Canto - Un canto pisano (2008, Edizioni ETS, Italy)
• Habitation: Collected Poems (2014, University of Washington Press)
• After Morning Rain (2018, Tiger Bark Press)

In Anthology

• Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (2018, University of Georgia Press)
• Seeds of Fire: Contemporary Poetry from the Other U.S.A. (2008, Smokestack Books)