Zack Rogow

Creative Writing and Literary Arts

Poetry

 afzr@uaa.alaska.edu

Zack Rogow is the author, editor or translator of eighteen books and plays, including six collections of poetry, three anthologies, four volumes of translation, and a children's book. Twice he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry. He is the author of two plays, including La Vie en Noir: The Art and Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor, which was performed in San Francisco by the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. He is the editor of a recent anthology of U.S. poetry, The Face of Poetry, published by University of California Press: and editor of two volumes of TWO LINES: World Writing in Translation, distributed by University of Washington Press. His translations of George Sand, Colette, and André Breton have won numerous awards, including the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award and the Northern California Book Award in Translation. His children's book, Oranges, was a Junior Library Guild Book-of-the-Month. He currently also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and has taught in the writing programs at the University of San Francisco and at San Francisco State University.

My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers, 2012

"The heart of this intensely moving book is the long poem about Rogow's mother, an extraordinary woman through whose life Rogow illuminates the anguished, fabulous history of the twentieth century." --Robert Thomas, author of Dragging the Lake and Door to Door.

The Number Before Infinity, 2008

THE NUMBER BEFORE INFINITY reads like a novel or memoir in verse. Each poem is a chapter in the story of two lovers united by passion but separated by previous commitments. In lyrical, accessible verse, the book follows the lovers as they choose between their deepening connection and their existing loyalties.

The Face of Poetry, 2005

This vibrant anthology showcases unforgettable poems and photographic portraits of leading writers in the United States, together with a CD that features many of the poets reading from their work. Edited by Zack Rogow, this book features multiple authors from the CWLA MFA program.

Green Wheat, 2004

Written in 1923, Green Wheat is set in a villa in Brittany and is a story of burgeoning sexuality. This edition does more than meet Rogow’s mark "to do justice to Colette’s enormous talent," it presents a great classic to the world once again. Translated by Zack Rogow

Arcanum 17, 2004

Using the huge Perce Rock - its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty - as his central metaphor, Breton considers love and loss, aggression and war, pacifism, feminism and the occult, in a book that is part prose and part poetry, part reality and part dream. Translated by Zack Rogow

Greatest Hits 1979-2001, 2002

A selection of the author's best poetry, mined from his works between 1979 and 2001.

The Selfsame Planet, 1999

Varied and rich, featuring first-person poems in the voices of women artists, this book creates a world of richly-felt and yet carefully-controlled emotion that brings the drama of its personae to life.

Horace, 1995

The first English-language edition of a major work by George Sand. Translated by the winner of the 1994 BOMC-PEN Translation Award. "A courageous work, nowadays unjustly neglected". -- Renee Winegarten "Sand develops her most advanced political, social and sexual views in this classic work". -- Feminist Bookstore News

Earthlight, 1993

Written to friends and fellow Surrealists such as Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Robert Desnos, Francis Picabia, Pierre Reverdy, and Max Ernst, the poems in the collection date from 1919 to 1936, spanning Breton’s involvement with Dadaism and his founding and development of Surrealism. Translated by Zack Rogow.