Paul Hoover
Paul Hoover earned a BA in English from Manchester University in North Manchester, Indiana, and an MA in English with an emphasis on creative writing from the University of Illinois Chicago.
Hoover is the author of fifteen poetry collections, including O, and Green: New and Selected Poems (MadHat Press, 2021); The Book of Unnamed Things (MadHat Press, 2018); Desolation: Souvenir (Omnidawn, 2012); In Idiom and Earth (En el idioma y en la tierra, 2012), translated by María Baranda (Mexico: Conaculta, 2012); Sonnet 56 (Les Figues, 2009); Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006); Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005); Winter Mirror (Flood Editions, 2002); Rehearsal in Black (Salt Publications, 2001); Viridian (University of Georgia Press, 1997); and The Novel: A Poem (New Directions, 1991).
Hoover has also published Fables of Representation: Essays (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and the novel Saigon, Illinois (Vintage Contemporaries, 1988), a chapter of which appeared in The New Yorker. The Italian translation of Saigon, Illinois, translated by Nicola Manuppelli, was published by Carbonio Editore of Milan in 2018. Hoover’s translations include The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz (Milkweed Editions, 2021), co-translated with María Baranda; Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn, 2008), co-translated with Maxine Chernoff; and two books with Nguyen Do, Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008) and Beyond the Court Gate: Selected Poems of Nguyen Trai (Counterpath Press, 2010). Hoover is the editor of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (W. W. Norton, 1994), which was reissued in 2013, and The New World Written: Selected Poems of María Baranda (Yale University Press, 2021).
Hoover is the recipient of the Frederick Bock Award, the 2009 PEN USA Translation Award, the 2002 Jerome J. Shestack Prize, the 1987 Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the 1984 General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Hoover is the editor of the annual literary magazine New American Writing. He served as poet in residence at Columbia College Chicago, where he founded a number of programs and the Columbia Poetry Review, from 1974 to 2003. Hoover has been a professor of English in the creative writing department at San Francisco State University since 2003.