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]
In Anthology
Hamill's most recent collection, Habitation: Collected Poems, was released in 2014 by the University of Washington Press. His poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Hamill has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Mellon Fund, and has won the Stanley Lindberg Lifetime Achievement Award for Editing and the Washington Poets Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
Mr. Hamill felt obligated to take action when he received an invitation in January 2003 to a White House symposium to be held by the first lady, Laura Bush, on the work of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. Outraged by the Bush administration's proposed military campaign in Iraq, he sent an email to 50 friends and colleagues rejecting the invitation and asking them to submit protest poems to him.
