August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1949. He is the author of 12 books of poetry, including Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems: 1975-1990 (2000), Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (2008), and Before Dawn on Bluff Road / Hollyhocks in the Fog: Selected New Jersey Poems / Selected San Francisco Poems (2017). He has also published two prose collections, Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (2005) and Music: I-LXXIV (2009). Kleinzahler’s honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught writing at Brown University, the University of California at Berkeley, and at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has lived for over two decades in San Francisco.
Audio Recordings with August Kleinzahler
- August Kleinzahler and Timothy Steele reading their poems