Paul Hoover (born 1946) is an American poet and editor born in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
His work has been associated with the New York School poets and innovative practices such as New York School and language poetry.
After many years as poet in residence at Columbia College Chicago, he accepted the position of Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University in 2003. He lives in Mill Valley, California, with his wife, the poet and fiction writer Maxine Chernoff.
He is widely known as editor, with Chernoff, of the literary magazine New American Writing, published once a year in association with San Francisco State University. He is also known for editing the anthology Postmodern American Poetry.
Hoover wrote the script for the 1994 independent film Viridian, directed by Joseph Ramirez, which was screened at The Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hamburg Film Festival.
He serves as curator of a new poetry series at the DeYoung Museum of Art in San Francisco. The series' first season, in the spring of 2007, featured Michael Palmer, Anne Carson, and Robert Hass.
Hoover was a founding board member and former president of the independent poetry reading series, "The Poetry Center at School of the Art Institute of Chicago," which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2004.
His poetry has appeared in the literary magazines American Poetry Review, Triquarterly, Conjunctions, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Sulfur, The New Republic, Hambone, and The Iowa Review, among others. It has also appeared in numerous anthologies including five volumes of the annual anthology The Best American Poetry series.
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In 2010, Hoover won the Frederick Bock Award for poems that appeared in the June 2010 issue of Poetry. In 2009, with Maxine Chernoff, he won the PEN-USA Translation Prize for Selected Poems of Friedrich Holderlin. In 2002, Hoover won the Jerome J. Shestack Award for the best poems to appear in American Poetry Review that year. He won the Carl Sandburg Award, Chicago's leading literary prize, for his 1987 collection, Idea and the 1984 General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers for poems later included in Nervous Songs. In 1980, he was awarded an NEA Fellowship in poetry.
Hoover has published thirteen poetry collections, a book of literary essays, and a novel. He has also co-translated three volumes of poetry from German and Vietnamese.