Sophie Cabot Black

Cabot was born in New York, New York and raised on a small farm in Wilton, Connecticut.[2] Her father is David Goldmark Black (b. 1931), a Broadway producer, actor, teacher, writer and artistic director.[3] Her mother is Linda (Cabot) Black, cofounder of Opera Company of Boston and Opera New England.[4] She has two siblings: actor Jeremy Black, who appeared as the boy Hitler clones in Boys from Brazil,[5] and Alexander Black. She also has two daughters. Her maternal great-grandfather was industrialist and philanthropist Godfrey Lowell Cabot.[6]

In 1980, Black received her Bachelor of Arts from Marlboro College. In 1984, she graduated from Columbia University with a Master of Fine Arts.[7]

Sophie Cabot Black is part of the Cabot family of the Boston Brahmin also known as the "first families of Boston."

The status of the Cabot family is hinted from the widely known toast given in 1910 at a College of the Holy Cross alumni dinner: "Here's to dear old Boston, The home of the bean and the cod, Where Lowells speak only to Cabots, And Cabots speak only to God."[8]

Black's poetry has appeared in publications including AGNI,[9] The Atlantic Monthly,[10] Boston Review,[11] The Paris Review, Poetry, Fence, APR, Bomb, The New Yorker,[12] and The New Republic. Various anthologies have also included her work, such as More Light: Father & Daughter Poems, The Best American Poetry 1993 (edited by Louise Glück), and Looking for Home: Women in Exile.[13]

Black has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (1988), the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (1988), and, most recently, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.[13] As of late 2003, she was teaching at Columbia.[2]

Black lives in New York and Wilton, Connecticut.[2]

• Selected poems online