Peter Orner and Maxine Chernoff [Canceled]

Please note: This event is canceled to help limit the potential exposure of novel coronavirus (COVID-19). For updated information on SF State’s response to COVID-19, visit the novel coronavirus information page.

Authors Peter Orner (“Maggie Brown and Others”) and Maxine Chernoff (“Under the Music”) read from their work. Free.

Peter Orner

Former SF State Professor Peter Orner, a Chicago native, is the author of two novels published by Little, Brown and Co.: “The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo” (2006) and “Love and Shame and Love” (2010), and three story collections published by Little, Brown and Co.: “Esther Stories” (2001); “Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge” (2013) and “Maggie Brown and Others” (2019).

Orner’s essay collection/memoir, “Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Reading to Live and Living to Read” (Catapult, 2016), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Maxine Chernoff

Creative Writing Professor Maxine Chernoff was a 2013 NEA Fellow in poetry.

She is the author of six books of fiction and 14 books of poetry. Of “Among the Names” (Apogee Press, 2005), 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” (Counterpath, 2014), “Without” (Shearsman, 2012), “To Be Read in the Dark” (Omnidawn, 2012), “A House in Summer” (Argotist, 2012) and “The Turning” (Apogee Press, 2008). Her collection of stories, “Signs of Devotion,” was a 1993 New York Times Notable Book. Both her novel “American Heaven” (Coffee House Press, 1996) and book of short stories, “Some of Her Friends That Year” (Coffee House Press, 2002), were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award.

With Paul Hoover, she translated “The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin” (Omnidawn Press, 2008), which received the 2009 Pen USA Translation Award.

Chernoff joined SF State in 1994.