August Kleinzahler published his first book of poetry, A Calendar of Airs, in 1978. Since then, he has published six others, including Storm over Hackensack (1985); Earthquake Weather (1989); Red Sauce Whiskey and Snow (1995); and Green Sees Things in Waves (1998). In 2000, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems 1975-1990. His poems have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Harper’s Magazine, Grand Street, The Threepenny Review, and The Paris Review. A native of Jersey City, Kleinzahler is the recipient of awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1989), the Lila Acheson-Reader’s Digest Award for Poetry (1991), and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1996). In 2000 he was awarded a Berlin Prize Fellowship. His latest book, a collection of meditations entitled Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained, was published in November, 2004 to considerable critical acclaim. He has also been named poet laureate of his hometown of Fort Lee, New Jersey.
Kleinzahler has been a taxi driver, a locksmith, a logger, and a building manager. He has taught creative writing courses at Brown University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as well as to homeless veterans in the Bay Area. He lives in San Francisco.
Judges’ Citation
The Strange Hours Travelers Keep is a masterful collection of work from a poet who inhabits the energies of urban life more fully than anyone currently writing.