Sharon Olson is a retired librarian, a Stanford graduate, with an M.L.S. from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Her chapbook Clouds Brushed in Later (1987) won the Abby Niebauer Memorial Chapbook Award, and a full-length book of poems, The Long Night of Flying, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in early 2019. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Off the Coast, String Poet, Arroyo Literary Review, The Curator, Adanna, Heron Tree, New Verse News and Cider Press Review. She has published (with co-author Chris Schopfer) numerous articles about the Sandford family of New Jersey in The Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey. She is a member of Cool Women, a performance group in central New Jersey.

Books by Sharon Olson:

Other poems on the web by Sharon Olson:
Four poems
"Trees Painted White"
"The Miraculous Draught of Fishes"
"Caryatids"

Sharon Olson's Website.

About Will There Be Music?:

"The loose ends of lives and generations are expertly bundled in these alert, meditative poems. Part of a poet's task is to catch the resonances of time and Sharon Olson has done that. What haunts her, and what she lucidly pursues, is the strange blend of signs and no-signs that signal the depth of a life, the passion and resignation-in her apt words, 'the ringing / of the empty bowl.'"
—Baron Wormser

"In Bishop's famous poem, 'In the Waiting Room' the seven-year old poet's self, realizing she's a separate being, an 'I,' an 'Elizabeth,' concludes 'How-I didn't know any/word for it-how unlikely . . .' Expect that degree of consternation and surprise reading Sharon Olson's Will There Be Music? Unlikelihoods abound until the sediment that shifts and settles-each poem, and this collection-makes for an intensely exciting, vivifying and illuminating read. Eliot thought the only 'method' of writing poems was 'to be very intelligent.' It worked for Eliot and it works for Olson; in her case brilliance weds curiosity and wit. It takes a lifetime to master the moves Olson's mastered; a lifetime to perceive, think, link, separate, and recombine disparate phenomena into records-of-experience this deftly wrought and richly abundant: How unlikely!"
—Gray Jacobik

"Sharon Olson's new collection has a panoramic feel to it, a wide geographical sweep, from north Jersey to northern Italy, and several places in between or beyond. Brimming with linguistic vitality, these poems also map the terrain of a poet's inner life, and they often do so via her responses to the art she loves, especially paintings, but also music and literature. You could call these poems ekphrastic, but it would be more accurate to think of them as an extended ode to the imagination and its many forms of expression. 'Will there be music?' asks the poet in her title poem. This collection definitively answers that question: we cannot live without it."
—Fred Marchant