Editing The Poems of Sylvia Plath
Amanda Golden will discuss The Poems of Sylvia Plath (Faber & Faber, 2026), which she co-edited with Karen V. Kukil of Smith College. Faber & Faber has called The Poems of Sylvia Plath a landmark publication: the definitive edition of the poet’s work for scholars, students, and general readers.
Plath’s first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This new volume draws on decades of research and almost doubles the content of that edition. The book is in two parts: the first contains the poems Plath composed in the last ten years of her life and upon which her reputation is founded, and the second includes those poems written in childhood and through her student years.
In both sections, the editors have dated, corrected, and arranged each poem chronologically, drawing on archival material. Critical notes document and cast new light on Plath’s extraordinary evolution as a poet, from her childhood compositions, through the early blossoming of her talent and ambition, and into the molten core that was to shape the poems of her last few years, securing her place in literary history.
Biography
Amanda Golden is Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology and a Research Affiliate at Smith College. She has co-edited The Poems of Sylvia Plath (2026) with Karen V. Kukil, a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Golden is author of Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets (2020), co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath (2022) with Anita Helle and Maeve O’Brien, and editor of This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (2016). She is Vice President of the Modernist Studies Association and will become President in October.
