Faculty:  Paul Hoover

Paul Hoover was born in Harrisonburg, Virginia and currently resides in Mill Valley, California.

Paul Hoover has published twelve poetry collections including: Corazón (bilingual poetry chapbook), translated by María Baranda, Puebla des las Angeles, México (LunArena Press, 2009), Sonnet 56 (Les Figues Press, 2009); Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006); Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005), nominated for the Northern California Book Award; Winter Mirror (Flood Editions, 2002); Rehearsal in Black (Salt Publishing, 2001); Totem and Shadow: New & Selected Poems (Talisman House, 1999); Viridian (The University of Georgia Press, 1997), winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series competition; and The Novel: A Poem (New Directions, l990). His other poetry books include Somebody Talks a Lot (The Yellow Press, l983) and Letter to Einstein Beginning Dear Albert (The Yellow Press, l979).

His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Sulfur, The New Republic, Hambone, and The Iowa Review, among others. It has also appeared in numerous anthologies including five volumes of the annual anthology The Best American Poetry (Scribners).

With Maxine Chernoff, he edited and translated Selected Poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin (Omnidawn, 2008) which won the 2009 PEN USA Translation Award. With Nguyen Do, he edited and translated the anthology, Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008), and Beyond the Court Gate: Poems of Nguyen Trai, 1380-1442 (Counterpath Press, 2010). He has also published a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and a novel, Saigon, Illinois (Vintage Contemporaries, 1988), a chapter of which appeared in The New Yorker.

He is editor of the anthology Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (W. W. Norton, 1994) and co-editor since 1971, with Maxine Chernoff, of the annual literary magazine New American Writing (Oink Press). He wrote the script for the 1994 independent film Viridian, directed by Joseph Ramirez, screened at The Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a founding board member of the Midwest’s leading independent poetry reading series, The Poetry Center at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, he curates the deYoung Poetry Series at San Francisco’s deYoung Museum of Fine Art.

He won the Jerome J. Shestack Award for the best poems to appear in American Poetry Review in 2002. Paul won the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, 1994-95; 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.

He is a Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

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“Edge and Fold confirms Paul Hoover as one of our important poets.” Rosemarie Waldrop

“Here are poems keeping perfect time because our time flows through them—beloved, attended with eloquent humility, unimpeded by any imperium save its own. This book is pure!”  Donald Revell (re: Edge and Fold)

"At the core of Paul Hoover’s distinguished body of work is the oldest and perhaps most thrilling value in poetry: entertainment. And what Italo Calvino championed as “lightness” (never to be confused with a lack of seriousness). Calvino proclaimed that whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, we need fresh methods of cognition and verification, and Hoover has certainly given us that. Book after book, Paul Hoover has made contemporary poetics common and useful as clouds and sunlight. For Hoover, poetics put into practice makes writing a model for the processes of reality: “Form is deep in portions your whole life long.” How does he manage to make his poems so keenly intelligent, so philosophically engaging, so extremely entertaining? These poems, for example, seem be written in neither Spanish nor Portuguese nor English, but in a new combinatoria, and many of them are unfashionably heartbreaking. Vallejo, Pessoa, Drummond de Andrade and Lorca are all here, as they share Paul Hoover’s secret of lightness, and assisted with his marvelous translation of “all kinds of speech, just beneath the ear.” Some Sunday, say your life broke down, “in a secret place somewhere in Ohio that was once mistaken for Spain,” lean up against a dead tree trunk and open this book. The light you see will be “like a camera filled with silver and potential.” These are Paul Hoover’s Poems in Spanish."  Gillian Conoley