Maxine Chernoff + Gillian Conoley

Camera is Maxine Chernoff’s 16th book of poems. Her previous book, Here, was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, as were 2 of her 6 works of fiction. Her book of stories Signs of Devotion was a NYT Notable Book of 1993. In 2013 she won an NEA Fellowship in Poetry and in 2009 the PEN USA Translation Award for a co-translation of the Selected Poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin. She is former editor of New American Writing and professor and former chair of the Dept of Creative Writing at SFSU. She has taught in Exeter, England, Prague, and St Petersburg, Russia, and was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2016.

Gillian Conoley was awarded the 2017 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her eighth poetry collection, Peace, was named an Academy of American Poets Standout Book for 2014 and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other books include The Plot Genie, Profane Halo, Lovers in the Used World, and Tall Stranger, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Conoley’s work has received the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Conoley’s translations of Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, appeared with City Lights in 2014, and was named one of the top ten poetry books of 2014 by Publishers Weekly. She co-translated (with Domenic Stansberry) Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto, On Feeble Love & Bitter Love (Molotov Editions, 2016). Conoley is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at Sonoma State University since 1994 and lives in the Bay Area.