The subject of an entire panel at the most recent meeting of the Modern Language Association, Chana Bloch is the author of four books of poems: The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, and Blood Honey. She is co-translator of the biblical Song of Songs and six books of contemporary Israeli poetry, including The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai and his magnum opus, Open Closed Open, and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. She is also the author of a critical study, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible.
The book awards of Chana Bloch include the Poetry Society of America’s Di Castagnola Award for Blood Honey, the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry for Mrs. Dumpty, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and the Book of the Year Award of the Conference on Christianity and Literature for Spelling the Word. Her work has appeared in many journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Field, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry and Threepenny Review, and has been reprinted in the Best American Poems, The Pushcart Prize, and other anthologies. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, in poetry and in translation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Bloch now serves as poetry editor of Persimmon Tree, an online journal of the arts by women over sixty years of age. She is a Professor Emerita of English at Mills College, where she taught for over thirty years and directed the creative writing program.
Chana Bloch performed on February 2nd, 2011.
