Sam Hamill

Sam Hamill (May 9, 1943 – April 14, 2018) was an American poet and the co-founder of Copper Canyon Press along with Bill O’Daly and Tree Swenson. He also initiated the Poets Against War movement (2003) in response to the Iraq War.

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

In 1996, Hamill edited The Gift of Tongues: Twenty-Five Years of Poetry From Copper Canyon Press. Hamill's introduction includes an in-depth personal history about Copper Canyon's path, its commitment to publishing poetry exclusively, and how the press strives to divide its publication list between younger emerging poets, major works by established poets, and poetry in translation.

Hamill's most recent book, Habitation: Collected Poems, presents some of Hamill's best poems spanning a career of over 40 years.

Poetry Books

• 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).
• Habitation: Collected Poems (2014, University of Washington 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)