Joshua Clover

Born on December 30, 1962, in California, Joshua Clover received his BA in English literature from Boston University and his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of three books of poems: Red Epic (Commune Editions, 2015); The Totality for Kids (University of California Press, 2006); and Madonna anno domini (Louisiana State University Press, 1997), which was chosen by Jorie Graham to receive the 1996 Walt Whitman Award.

About The Totality for Kids, Judith Butler writes: 

In this brilliant volume, the fragmented world of a late and lost modernity has its own moving and lucid affect, its forms of aliveness. We encounter here an enormous clarity of language in the service of a poetics that brilliantly queries our historical moment in and as form.

Clover is also a widely published critic and journalist, having written for Film Quarterly, The Nation, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, and the Village Voice. His most recent book of cultural theory is Of Riot (Verso Books, 2016). His contribution to the Modern Classics series for the British Film Institute, The Matrix, was published in 2005. He is also the author of 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About (University of California Press, 2009).

Clover’s other awards include two Pushcart Prizes, the University of Iowa’s James Michener/Paul Engle Fellowship, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Clover was a professor of critical and political theory in the departments of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Davis, until his death on April 26, 2025.