About the Author:

Maxine Chernoff has published six books of fiction and eleven books of poetry.  Her books with Coffee House Press are Bop (1986); American Heaven (1996); and Some of Her Friends That Year: New and Selected Stories (2002).  The latter two books were nominated for the Bay Area Book Award.  Her first book of stories, Bop, was reprinted in the Vintage Contemporary Fiction Series. With Paul Hoover, she received the 2009 PEN Translation Award for The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin (Omnidawn Press).  She coedits the long-running literary journal New American Writing and chairs the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She has read and taught writing in many countries including England, Belgium, Scotland, Australia, Russia, China, the Czech Republic, Brazil, and Kenya.

Books Available:

Praise for Maxine Chernoff

“Chernoff’s language is supple and rhythmic, her images are precise and vivid, and her sympathies run deep. Her stories do not rant fashionable, or show off, or whine: they sing, they celebrate life and death, and they enlarge their readers.”—Chicago Sun-Times/Friends of Literature Chicago Book of the Year Award Judges

“Like a superreal painter, Ms. Chernoff treats minutiae with the importance of the important, stylistically upgrading the trivial to the essential…Absurdist but loving, measuring words with an eyedropper but not minimalist, Ms. Chernoff is pyrotechnically funny, but stories like ‘California’ and ‘November’ clutch the heart too hard to allow her to be labeled a humorist…[Her characters are] roiling, smart and thoughtful, they’re a revelation.” —New York Times Book Review

Maxine Chernoff

For More Information:

EPC/Maxine Chernoff page