About Sappho

The incomplete nature of Sappho’s surviving poems is echoed in the fragmentary state of evidence about her life. Earliest and best-loved of the surviving female ancient Greek poets, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos and flourished around 600 BCE. During the more than two millennia since, much of her body of work has been lost, apart from some few excerpts quoted in the texts of later authors; new-found Sapphic fragments, however, continue to be rediscovered even up to the present day, sifted out of lacunose pieces of papyri and swept up into broader conversations about love, loss, and memory.

Bio by Kathryn H. Stutz