Eva Hooker is Regents Professor of Poetry at Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota. She lives in Avon, a small town in the hills, lakes, and murrains of central Minnesota. Long Minnesota winters, the 2000 acre nature preserve and monastery which houses Saint John’s, and summers spent on Madeline Island, one of the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior, have fed her love of nature.
Her poems have been most recently
published in The Harvard Review and The Massachusetts Review,
Orion, Shenandoah, Salmagundi, Rivendell and In
a Fine Frenzy, an anthology of poems about Shakespeare (University of
Iowa Press). The Winter
Keeper, a hand bound chapbook
(Chapiteau Press, 2000) was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in poetry. “The Clothier’s Yard: Church and the Imagination,” an essay
in prose strophes on religion and imagination appeared in Leaven for the
World: Catholic Reflections on
Faith, Vocation, and the Intellectual Life (Sheed & Ward), edited
by Tom Landy.
Twomanuscripts of poetry, Portion
and Girl at the Great Lake, are in circulation.
For several years she has
been a member of Frank Bidart’s master class at the New York State Writer’s
institute.
Blurb for The Winter
Keeper:
“Here every word is weighted,
measured, chosen with the care that renders it fit for the damask of Eva
Hooker’s lapidary art. Plain
American downrightness shaking hands with surrealism – whatever makes
‘antinomies of fit & obligation’ into what we need, ‘a house deep enough to
live in / in the coldest season.’ Begin with What They Said in the Avon Quik
Mart, then read The One Man
Rocking There. This is a memorable, eloquent
debut.” --Frank Bidart