TONY HOAGLAND, POET

“There is nothing escapist or diversionary about Tony Hoagland’s poetry. Here’s misery, death, envy, hypocrisy, and vanity. But the still sad music of humanity is played with such a light touch on an instrument so sympathetically tuned that one can’t help but laugh. Wit and morality rarely consort these days; it’s good to see them happily, often hilariously reunited in the winner’s poetry.”
—Stephen Young, The Poetry Foundation

 “Tony Hoagland's imagination ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, kinds of speech both lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild. His is the poetry of an adult capable of engaging the wonder and torments of childhood. In his volumes, he reminds us that a book of poems can offer the thrills of discovery: purposeful, swift, agile, ambitious and irreverent: fresh.”  
—American Academy of Arts and Letters citation 2002

Tony Hoagland is the author of three volumes of poetry: Sweet Ruin, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and What Narcissism Means to Me, as well as a collection of essay's about poetry, Real Sofistakashun all by Graywolf Press. His poems and critical essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Ploughshares. Hoagland currently teaches in the poetry program at the University of Houston. He is the winner of the 2005 O.B. Hardison Jr. Prize. Awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is the only national prize to recognize a poet's teaching as well as his art. Hoagland also received the 2005 Mark Twain Award, given by the Poetry Foundation in recognition of a poets contribution to humor in American poetry.

Tony Hoagland's poems have been described as moving unerringly with wit and irony, like an arrow through its target—we, the readers—with exhilarating results. His poems sprint across the page and unexpectedly blow apart a single moment, exposing its contradictory nature—and often our folly. Hoagland explores the spiritual bereftness of American satisfaction, creating poetry that is scathing, funny, rich, and refreshingly intelligent. Steven Cramer writes of Hoagland's poems, "[they] grapple with selfhood and manhood, but they also consider the mysteries of the national identity—how the social and the personal mutually impinge."