Clover, Joshua 1962-

PERSONAL:

Born 1962, in Berkeley, CA. Education: Boston University, B.A., 1987; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1991.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, University of California, Davis, One Shields Ave., Davis, CA 95616. E-mail—jclover@ucdavis.edu.

CAREER:

Poet, writer, journalist, critic, and educator. University of California, Davis, associate professor of English. Also resident fellow in poetry at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, 1992-93.

AWARDS, HONORS:

University Prize for excellence in teaching, 1991; Michener/Engle fellowship in poetry, 1993-94; National Endowment for the Arts individual fellowship, 1994; Walt Whitman Award, 1996, for Madonna anno domini; Pushcart Prize for poetry, 1997 and 1998; Robert D. Richardson Award for nonfiction writing, 1999.

WRITINGS:

Madonna anno domini: Poems, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1997.

The Totality for Kids (poems), University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2006.

Also author of Their Ambiguity, Quemadura, 2003, and The Matrix, British Film Institute, 2004. Poetry has appeared in anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, 1997, 2001, and 2003 editions; American Poets in the 21st Century; and American Poetry: Next Generation. Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times; poetry editor for the Village Voice Literary Supplement.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joshua Clover is a poet whose first book, Madonna anno domini: Poems, won the 1996 Walt Whitman Award. In his collection, the author writes about a wide range of topics, from nuclear devastation to the media. Noting that the author "writes in many modes: lyrics, prose poems, fictionalized postcards, and other invented forms," John Yau also wrote in the Boston Review: "Madonna anno domini's primary subject is America as media invention, mythic domain, urban and rural landscape, and socio-political entity at the end of a war-torn century." A Publishers Weekly contributor called the collection "something unique and transformational."

In his collection of poems titled The Totality for Kids, Clover continues to cast his poetic eye across America and the world's landscape, incorporating into his poems everything from California and Paris to music and postmodern theory. Writing in Publishers Weekly, a reviewer noted: "The poems take forms that draw toxins out of history." Dan Chiasson wrote in Poetry: "These are poems of loneliness in [the] actual world: little elegies for the theory-self before the dawn of aging, before the grisly new century, before—and here I may be over-reading—the question of ‘kids’ (whether to have one, whether to allow oneself to be one forever) took over."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Boston Review, December, 1997, John Yau, review of Madonna anno domini: Poems.

Poetry, September 1, 2006, Dan Chiasson, review of The Totality for Kids, p. 449.

Publishers Weekly, March 31, 1997, review of Madonna anno domini, p. 70; August 25, 1997, review of The Best American Poetry 1997, p. 67; April 3, 2006, review of The Totality for Kids, p. 42.

ONLINE

Chicago Postmodern Poetry.com,http://www.chicagopostmodernpoetry.com/ (May 15, 2007), interview with author.

Greenbelt Review,http://greenbelt.ucdavis.edu/ (May 15, 2007), Phoebe Wayne, "Interview with Joshua Clover about His New Book, The Totality for Kids."

PoetryFoundation.org,http://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (May 15, 2007), brief profile of author.

Poets.org,http://www.poets.org/ (May 15, 2007), brief profile of author.

University of California Davis, Department of English Web site,http://wwwenglish.ucdavis.edu/faculty/ (May 15, 2007), faculty profile of author.