Maxine Chernoff and Gillian Conoley
Maxine Chernoff
Maxine Chernoff is a professor and chair of the Creative Writing Department at SF State. She is the author of six books of fiction and 13 books of poetry. Of “Among the Names,” Cole Swenson said, “Exploring complexities of ‘the gift,’ Chernoff’s is an economy of the uncanny—each exchange is strikingly new.” Her recent books of poetry are Here, Without, To Be Read in the Dark, A House in Summer and The Turning. Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. Her novel American Heaven and book of short stories, Some of Her Friends That Year, were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. With Paul Hoover, she translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, which received the 2009 Pen U.S.A. Translation Award. Chernoff edits the long-running and award-winning journal New American Writing, an annual anthology funded in part by the College of Liberal and Creative Arts.
Gillian Conoley
Gillian Conoley is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Plot Genie, Profane Halo, Lovers in the Used World, Beckon, National Book Critics’ Circle Award finalist Tall Stranger and Some Gangster Pain. A recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from the American Poetry Review, several Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts award and Fund for Poetry Award, Conoley is professor and poet-in-residence at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of VOLT Magazine. Her work has been widely anthologized, most recently in W.W. Norton’s American Hybrid, Scribner’s Best American Poetry, Fence’s Best of Fence, Counterpath’s Lyric Postmodernisms and the Italian anthology, Nuova Poesia Americana, published by Oscar Mondadori.