Sandra is a Visiting Professor in the Literature department at Bennington College in Vermont. She received her PhD in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Florida State University in 2009 and has been a full time Associate Professor of English at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia since 2009. All eight of her collections of poetry explore the intersection of feminism and late capitalism. Atopia, her seventh book, which The New Yorker says, “sings of the absurdities, inanities, and injustices that pervade modern life,” is an epic grappling with the political climate of the United States since November 2016. Poems from her books have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, The Boston Review, Granta, and The American Poetry Review. Simonds’s scholarly writing centers on the leftist politics of both contemporary poets and modernists. In both “Riot Girl,” and “Why Ruin Everyone’s Life for Dolls?” she examines experimental form and female agency in the work of Chelsey Minnis and Kate Durbin. She has also written about Victoria Chang’s Obit and the way avant-garde and traditional forms intersect with motherhood. She also participated in a roundtable at the Poetry Project in New York City that investigated the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s participation in a reading at the White House and the political ramifications of this event. In addition, she has reviewed books by Roger Reeves, Heather McHugh, Major Jackson, Carolyn Forché, and Danez Smith for The New York Times. After thirteen years of teaching full time at Thomas University in South Georgia, she is on leave and teaching literature fulltime at Bennington College in Vermont. Her teaching experiences are intimately entwined with her poetic output. At Bennington, she created a wide variety of classes including a class on Romance Literature of the Middle Ages, a class on Confessional Poetry and a class on the theme of ghosts in the 19th century. Throughout her career, she has championed the belief both inside and outside of the classroom that poetry should challenge the norms, values and beliefs that we hold, not simply conform or confirm them. That is why she consistently writes about women, class struggle, and social change. Her work is accessible yet challenges people to think about the world around them and to think about what wealth inequality does to human relationships. She hopes to continue to transform the lives around her through a combination of her steadfast dedication to poetry.