Chana Bloch

Chana Bloch
File:Chana-image-color.png
Occupation	poet, translator, Professor Emerita at Mills College
Website
http://www.chanabloch.com/

Chana Bloch (born March 15, 1940, New York City) is an American poet, translator, and scholar. She is a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation and included in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize and other anthologies. She is the poetry editor of Persimmon Tree, an online journal of the arts by women over sixty.

Poetry

Bloch has published four collections of her poetry; The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty and Blood Honey.

Translations

She is co-translator, with Ariel Bloch, of the Song of Songs, and has translated The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai and Amichai's Open Closed Open. Other translations include Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch.

Nonfiction

Bloch is the author of the critical study, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible.

Awards

She has won the Poetry Society of America's Di Castagnola Award for Blood Honey; the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry for Mrs. Dumpty; and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, together with Chana Kronfeld, for Open Closed Open. Her co-translation of the Song of Songs was a Times Literary Supplement book of the year. She has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, for poetry and translation, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Discovery Award of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center.

Musical adaptions

Chana's Story, a song cycle by David Del Tredici based on her work, premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Jorge Liderman's cantata, The Song of Songs, based on her co-translation, has been performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the University of California at Berkeley Chamber Chorus.

Academic life

Bloch earned her B.A. from Cornell University, her M.A. degrees in Judaic studies and english literature from Brandeis University, and a Ph.D. in english from the University of California at Berkeley. She has been on the faculty of Mills College for thirty years, where she has directed their creative writing program. Bloch has held residencies at the Bellagio Center for Scholars and Artists, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She has given lectures on her work at numerous U.S. colleges and universities.

Personal life

She has lived in Berkeley, California since 1967. She was previously married to fellow translator Ariel Bloch.

Bibliography

Poetry collections

• Blood Honey, Autumn House Press (2009)
• Mrs. Dumpty, University of Wisconsin Press (1998)
• The Past Keeps Changing, Sheep Meadow Press (1992)
• The Secrets of the Tribe, Sheep Meadow Press (1981)

Translations

• Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, with Chana Kronfeld. W.W. Norton (2009)
• Open Closed Open, Yehuda Amichai, co-translated by Chana Kronfeld. Harcourt Brace (2000)
• Yehuda Amichai: The Selected Poetry. With Stephen Mitchell. Harper & Row (1986). reprinted, University of California Press (1996)
• The Song of Songs, With Ariel Bloch. Random House (1995). reprinted, University of California Press (1998)
• The Window, Dahlia Ravikovitch. co-translated by Ariel Bloch. Sheep Meadow Press (1989)
• A Dress of Fire, Dahlia Ravikovitch. Sheep Meadow Press (1978)

Nonfiction

• Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible, University of California Press (1985)

External Links

• Persimmon Tree website
• Bloch website