Sarah Arvio (born April 3, 1954) is an American poet, essayist and translator.
She is the author of Visits from the Seventh, Sono: cantos, and night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis.
She has won the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bogliasco fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and other honors.
Arvio has lived in Caracas, Mexico City, Paris, Rome and New York. She works as a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland; she has also taught poetry at Princeton University.
Arvio has been widely published in journals and magazines. Her work has also appeared in many anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2015, The Best American Poetry 1998, The Best American Erotic Poetry, Women's Work, the FSG Book of 20th Century Italian Poetry, the Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, and Ariadne's Thread: A Collection of Contemporary Women's Journals.
The poet and philosopher John Koethe, in his citation for Arvio's Boston Review prize, said:
Her poems have been set to music. William Bolcom set âÂÂChagrinâ for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble in a song cycle entitled "The Hawthorn Treeâ (which also adapts poems by Louise Bogan, Willa Cather, Anne Carson, Stevie Smith and Elinor Wylie). Steven Burke set âÂÂArmorâ in a monodrama entitled âÂÂSkin,â for mezzo-soprano and cello. Miriama Young composed âÂÂCôte dâÂÂAzurâ as "Inner Voices of Blue", first for tenor and chamber ensemble and later resetting it for mezzo-soprano.
She was the translator and poetry editor for the film Azul: Land of Poets (1988), directed by Roland Legiardi-Laura. She also worked as a research associate for the landmark film series on American poets, Voices & Visions, which aired on PBS in 1988.