Matthew Hofer

Matthew Hofer, professor of English at the University of New Mexico, writes about and teaches courses on English-language poetry and poetics, especially formally innovative and experimental work in the tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams. He edits, for UNM Press, the series Recencies: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century American Poetics, serves on the editorial board of the annual 1913: A Journal of Forms, and is a consulting editor for the chapbook series Voices from the American Land. He has written extensively on modernist poetry and the public sphere, and is currently working on a book-length manuscript on “spareness” in twentieth-century poetry. He has edited volumes on Ed Dorn (2013), Sinclair Lewis (2012), and Oscar Wilde (2009), and has guest edited a special issue of The Langston Hughes Review (2009). His essays have appeared in such journals as Modernism/Modernity, New German Critique, Contemporary Literature, Paideuma, and Jacket2. He has also contributed chapters to many edited volumes, including The Cambridge History of American Poetry (“Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists”), The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry (“Contemporary Critical Trends”), Ezra Pound in Context (“Education”), and American Literary Scholarship (two chapters on poetry, 1900-1945, and four on T. S. Eliot). His scholarly monograph, Omnicompetent Modernists: Poetry, Politics, and the Public Sphere is forthcoming in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series, published by the University of Alabama Press.

Ph.D. University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. (English)
M.A. Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. (English)
B.A. Trinity University, San Antonio, Tex. (English and Economics)

Selected Publications:
The Shoshoneans: People of the Basin Plateau, Expanded edition, text by Ed Dorn, photographs by Leroy Lucas, foreword by Simon J. Ortiz, ed. Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico Press, 2013)
Sinclair Lewis Remembered, ed. Gary Scharnhorst and Matthew Hofer (University of Alabama Press, 2012)
Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews, ed. Matthew Hofer and Gary Scharnhorst (University of Illinois Press, 2009)
“Langston Hughes’s Audiences after the 1930s,” special issue of The Langston Hughes Review, ed. Matthew Hofer (fall 2009)
“Mina Loy, Giovanni Papini, and the Aesthetic of Irritation,” in Paideuma: Studies in American and British Modernist Poetry 38 (winter 2011)
"'Between Worlds': Paul Celan and W. S. Merwin," in New German Critique 91 (winter 2004)
"Ezra Pound v. 'The Perverters of Language,'" in Modernism/Modernity 9 (September 2002)