Bio

Maxine Chernoff is chair of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University and longtime editor of the journal New American Writing. A poet, fiction writer, and translator, she was the 2009 winner of the PEN USA Translation Prize for her work in collaboration with Paul Hoover on The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin (Omnidawn Press, 2008). Her collections of novels and short stories include Signs of Devotion (Simon and Schuster), which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993, the novel American Heaven (Coffee House Press, 1996) and Some of Her Friends that Year: New and Selected Stories (Coffee House Press, 2002), both of which were finalists for the Northern California Book Award. She is the author of thirteen collections of poems including Without (Shearsman, 2012), To Be Read in the Dark (Omnidawn, 2011), and The Turning (Apogee Press, 2008). Her interests in the last three volumes are how the personal and political intersect and how one becomes attentive to both through their interplay in language. She has taught in Exeter, England, as a Visiting International Scholar in the Prague Summer Program, and in SLS's program in St. Petersburg, Russia. She has also read her poems in China, Belgium, Brazil, and Germany. Her work has been translated into many languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Romanian, Farsi, and Arabic. She is winner of a CLMP Editors' Award, a PEN Fiction Award, five Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, and many other prizes. Noted for writing prose poems, her new manuscript Here represents a return to that form.