Maxine Chernoff is the author of more than 20 poetry collections and 6 works of fiction including a NYT Notable Book of 1993, Signs of Devotion.With Paul Hoover she won the 2009 PEN International Translation Award for their work on Friedrich Hoelderlin as well as a 2013 NEA Fellowship in Poetry. An emeritus professor of Creative Writing at SFSU, she served as chair from 1997-2016. She has also taught at Exeter University in England (2013), the Prague Summer Program for Writers (2010), and for the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia (2001). In 2016 she was a visiting writer at the American Academy in Rome. She has read her work internationally in England, Scotland, Belgium, Russia, the Czech Republic, China, and Brazil. Former co-editor of New American Writing, she has lived in the Bay Area since 1994. While still a Chicago resident, she won the Carl Sandburg Award, The Chicago Sun-Times Fiction Award, and five Illinois Arts Council Fellowships. She was a frequent reviewer of fiction for the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Her two previous books, Under the Music: Collected Prose Poems and Light and Clay: Selected Poems are available from MadHat Press, which will bring out a book of essays about her work, A Jar of Air, in 2026. Diary : Poems appeared from Quale Press in 2026.