Maxine Chernoff:
Born and raised in Chicago, Maxine Chernoff earned a BA and an MA from the University of Illinois. Winner of the PIP Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in 2006, Chernoff, in an innovative, post-modern approach, often utilizes prose forms. Her collections of poetry include A Vegetable Emergency (1977); Utopia TV Store: prose poems (1979); New Faces of 1952 (1985), winner of the Carl Sandburg Award; Leap Year Day: New and Selected Poems (1990); World: Poems 1991–2001; and Here (2014).
Chernoff’s poems can be surreal, witty, and politically engaged. In a review of World for Jacket Magazine, Rachel Loden found that “wit cuts in and out of the melodic surge and flow” of the volume. Chernoff references Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz and employs epigraphs from Ralph Waldo Emerson in one section, prompting Loden to note “the impressionistic structures of these poems, their hops and skips across a rippling surface that suggests the freedoms and pleasures of hypertext.”
Chernoff has also written fiction, and her short story collection Signs of Devotion was a New York Times Notable Book in 1993. Her translations, with Paul Hoover, of the work of Friedrich Hölderlin won the PEN Center USA Translation Award.
She is an editor of the journal New American Writing and a professor at San Francisco State University.
Matthew Cooperman:
Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently, the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2024) and Wonder About The, winner of the Halcyon Prize (Middle Creek, 2023) as well as NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified), w/Aby Kaupang, (Futurepoem, 2018), Spool, winner of the New Measure Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), and other books. His ninth book, Time, & Its Monument, is forthcoming from Station Hill Press. Cooperman is a 2025 Guggeheim Fellow in Poetry and Professor of English at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang. More info at http://matthewcooperman.org
On atmosphere:
“Our job is to be both epic and tiny,” Matthew Cooperman writes in this powerful book-length poem full of turns and twists on the American long poem road. Cooperman meditates on and tracks our imperiled American democracy, and the precarious future it forecasts as he twines the political world with the challenges and beauty of family life. In the face of crises, he affirms the meanings of love and the ways in which the language of poetry can bring us truths that are shattering and brilliant. —Peter Balakian, author of Ozone Journal, winner of the Pulitzer Prize