Clifton Snider

Writing as an openly gay man, my poetry, fiction, and scholarly work cannot help but be political. However, my poems, and to some extent my novels and stories, are not only based in a fildelty to facts (be they from science, history, current events, or my personal experience) but also in a commitment to curiosity (especially regarding nature, the places I’ve visited, science, history, myth and ritual), the truth, justice, love, compassion, and acceptance of diversity. I published my first poem in 1969 in Gambit, a literary magazine published by the English Department at Cal State Long Beach, but I did not come of age as a poet (and scholar) till I was in grad school at the University of New Mexico.

As for my bio, I am the internationally celebrated author of eleven books of poetry, including Moonman: New and Selected Poems and, most recently, The Beatle Bump, and four novels: Loud Whisper, Bare Roots, Wrestling with Angels: A Tale of Two Brothers, and The Plymouth Papers. I was privileged to pioneer LGBTQ literary studies at California State University, Long Beach. A Jungian/Queer Literary critic, I have published hundreds of poems, short stories, reviews, and articles internationally, as well as the book, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On: A Jungian Interpretation of Literature, in which I analyze the work of such queer writers as A.C. Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers, and W.H. Auden. Among the topics I’ve published articles on are Edward Lear, Emily Dickinson, and Brokeback Mountain. I have been awarded numerous residence fellowships at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY), The Karolyi Foundation (Vence, France), and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (Taos, NM). A multiple Pushcart Award nominuee in poetry and fiction, my work has been translated into Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish.