Chris Hosea

Born in Princeton, New Jersey, on November 11, 1973, Chris Hosea earned a BA in English and AmericanlLiterature from Harvard College. He then went on to receive his MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

His first poetry collection, Put Your Hands In, was selected by John Ashbery as the winner of the 2013 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2014.

About Put Your Hands In, Ashbery writes:

Exactly a century ago, the Armory Show brought European avant-garde art to New York. We are still experiencing its consequences. Among the works on view was Marcel Duchamp’s notorious Nude Descending a Staircase, which a derisive critic wanted to rename, “Explosion in a Shingle Factory.” Both titles come to mind as one reads Chris Hosea’s Put Your Hands In, which somehow subsumes derision and erotic energy and comes out on top. Maybe that’s because “poetry is the cruelest month," as he says, correcting T.S. Eliot. Transfixed in mid-paroxysm, the poems also remind us of Samuel Beckett’s line (in Watt): “The pain not yet pleasure, the pleasure not yet pain.” One feels plunged in a wave of happening that is about to crest.

Hosea is also the author of Double Zero (Prelude, 2016). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Bibliography

Double Zero (Prelude, 2016)
Put Your Hands In (Louisiana State University Press, 2014)