Joe Milford Hosts Maxine Chernoff!

Maxine Chernoff is a professor and Chair of the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. With Paul Hoover, she edits the long-running literary journal New American Writing. She is the author of six books of fiction and eight books of poetry, most recently Among the Names (Apogee Press, 2005), of which Cole Swenson said, “Among the Names [creates] a vast and layered network, in short, an economy. Exploring complexities of “the gift,” Chernoff’s is an economy of the uncanny—each exchange is strikingly new.” Her work has appeared in many magazines including Conjunctions, Zyzzyva, North American Review, Chicago Review, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Sulfur, New Directions Annual, Denver Quarterly, Hambone, Slope, and Verse. Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion, was a NYT Notable Book of 1993. Both her novel American Heaven and her book of short stories, Some of Her Friends That Year, were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Her novel A Boy in Winter is currently in production in Canada by an independent film company. With Paul Hoover, she has translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, which will be published by Omnidawn Press in 2007. She has read her poetry in Liege, Belgium; Cambridge, England; Sydney, Australia; Berlin, Germany; Sao Paolo, Brazil; Glasgow, Scotland; Yunnan Province, China; and St. Petersburg, Russia. She lived in Chicago from 1952-1994.