Maxine Chernoff is a professor and Chair of the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. She is the author of six books of fiction and twelve books of poetry, most recently World (Salt, 2001), Evolution of the Bridge (Salt, 2003), Among the Names (Apogee Press, 2005) and The Turning (Apogee, 2008). Of the latter, Cole Swenson said, "exploring complexities of "the gift," Chernoff's is an economy of the uncanny—each exchange is strikingly new." Of The Turning , poet Gillian Conoley said, "In stanzas taut as guitar strings, …these poems recall a kind of classic Ahkmatovan cry…combined with a Tsvetaeva-like pluckiness, all of which gets overridden by Chernoff's supreme humanitiy, ferocity, intelligence, wit, honesty." Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion (Simon and Schuster, 1993), was a New York Times Notable Book. Both her novel American Heaven (Coffee House Press, 1996) and her book of short stories, Some of Her Friends That Year (Coffee House Press, 2002), were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. With Paul Hoover, she edits the journal New American Writing and translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin , (Omnidawn, 2008), which received the 2009 Pen American Translation Award. She has read her poetry in Belgium, England, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Scotland, China, the Czech Republic, Greece, and Russia.