Paul Hoover's Biography

Paul Hoover is the author of twelve books of poetry including Sonnet 56 (Les Figues Press, 2009), consisting of 56 formal variations on Shakespeare's sonnet 56; Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006); Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005), nominated for the Bay Area Book Award; Winter (Mirror), Flood Editions, 2002; Rehearsal in Black (Salt Publications, 2001); Totem and Shadow: New & Selected Poems (Talisman House, 1999); Viridian (The University of Georgia Press, 1997); and The Novel: A Poem (New Directions, 1990). He is editor of the anthology Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) and, with Maxine Chernoff, the annual literary magazine New American Writing. His collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation, was published in the Poets on Poetry series of University of Michigan Press in 2004. He has also published a novel, Saigon, Illinois (Vintage Contemporaries, 1988), a chapter of which appeared in The New Yorker. With Maxine Chernoff, he has translated Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn, 2008), which won the 2009 PEN-USA Translation Award. With Nguyen Do, he has edited and translated the anthology, Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008) and Beyond the Court Gate:  Selected Poems of Nguyen Trai (Counterpath Press, 2010). In 2002, he won the Jerome J. Shestack Award for the best poems to appear in American Poetry Review that year. He won the Carl Sandburg Award, Chicago’s leading literary prize, for his collection, Idea (The Figures, l987) and the l984 General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers for poems later included in Nervous Songs (L’Epervier Press, l986). In 1980, he was awarded an NEA Fellowship in poetry. A founding board member of The Poetry Center at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he is curator of the Friday Night Poetry Series at the deYoung Museum of San Francisco. Born in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in 1946, he is Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.