Maxine Chernoff (born 1952) is an American novelist, writer, poet, academic and literary magazine editor. She was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, and attended the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Chernoff is a professor and Chair of the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. With her husband, Paul Hoover, she edits the long-running literary journal "New American Writing". She is the author of six books of fiction and ten books of poetry, most recently The Turning (which appeared in May 2008) and Among the Names (2005), both from Apogee Press.
Both her novel American Heaven and her book of short stories, Some of Her Friends That Year, were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. With Paul Hoover, she has translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, which was published by Omnidawn Press in 2008, and won the 2009 PEN Translation Award. She has read her poetry in Liege, Belgium; Cambridge, England; Sydney, Australia; Berlin, Germany; São Paulo, Brazil; Glasgow, Scotland; Yunnan Province, China; and St. Petersburg, Russia, and Prague, Czech Republic.
As of 2013, she lives in Mill Valley, California.
Reviewers Award