Wednesday

Maxine Chernoff is a professor and Chair of the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University.  With Paul Hoover, she edits the long-running literary journal New American Writing, now in its 28^th issue. She is the author of six books of fiction and nine books of poetry, most recently The Turning (Apogee Press, 2008).  Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. Both her novel American Heaven and her book of short stories, Some of Her Friends… were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Wiith Paul Hoover, she has translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, which won the PEN USA 2009 Translation Award.

Paul Hoover lived in Chicago from 1968 to 1994 where he was a founding board member of The Poetry Center of Chicago and long-time poet-in-residence at Columbia College Chicago. Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University since 2003, he edited the widely adopted anthology, Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) and currently curates the poetry reading series at the de Young Museum of Fine Art in San Francisco. His most recent poetry collections are Sonnet 56 (Les Figues Press, 2009), consisting of 56 formal versions of Shakespeare’s sonnet of that number, Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006), and Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005), which was nominated for the Bay Area Book Award.