Allen Hoey

Allen Hoey (October 21, 1952 – June 16, 2010) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic who received numerous honors during his lifetime, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his 2008 collection of poems Country Music.

Allen Hoey was born in Kingston, New York, and raised in the mid-Hudson River Valley. He moved to northern New York to do his undergraduate work, then relocated to Syracuse, New York to complete his graduate work at Syracuse University where he studied with Hayden Carruth. He received both a Masters (1980) and a Doctor of Arts (1984) in English (Creative Writing). In 1985 he took a teaching position at Ithaca College and moved to Ithaca, New York in 1986. In 1990 he took a teaching position at Bucks County Community College where he taught writing, literature, and Buddhism. In 1994 he received the precepts and formalized his commitment to Rinzai Zen Buddhist practice. Hoey has two sons by his first marriage, Owen (1980) and Stephen (1984). He died on June 16, 2010. He was a resident of Solebury, Pennsylvania just outside New Hope, Pennsylvania.

Hoey has written five full-length collections of poetry and three novels. His first collection, A Fire in the Cold House of Being, was selected by Galway Kinnell as winner of the 1985 Camden Poetry Award. This book was published in 1987 and was followed by What Persists in 1992 and two collections in 2005, Provençal Light and The Precincts of Paradise. In 2006 he published a novel, Chasing the Dragon. He received a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts literature fellowship, placing his poetry and criticism in many prominent literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Hudson Review, Poetry, and The Southern Review. His poem "A Thousand Prostrations" was included in Essential Zen, and another poem, "Essay on Snow," was included in The Best American Spiritual Writing of 2004. Hoey's second novel, Voices Beyond the Dead, a more politically oriented book, was released in the summer of 2007, and his fifth collection of poems, Country Music, was published in spring 2008.

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