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National Book Foundation > Author > Jay Hopler
Jay Hopler (1970-2022) was the author of Green Squall and The Abridged History of Rainfall, a National Book Award Finalist; and the editor, with Kimberly Johnson, of Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry. More about this author >
Confronted with a terminal cancer diagnosis, Jay Hopler—author of the National Book Award-finalist The Abridged History of Rainfall—got to work. The result of that labor is Still Life, a collection of poems that are heartbreaking, terrifying, and deeply, darkly hilarious. More about this book >
Jay Hopler's second collection, a mourning song for his father, is an elegy of uproar, a careening hymn to disaster and its aftermath. In lyric poems by turns droll and desolate, Hopler documents the struggle to live in the face of great loss, a task that sends him ranging through Florida's torrid subtropics, the mountains of the American West, the streets of Rome, and the Umbrian countryside. More about this book >
Jay Hopler (1970-2022) was the author of Green Squall and The Abridged History of Rainfall, a National Book Award Finalist; and the editor, with Kimberly Johnson, of Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry. The recipient of, among other awards and prizes, the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, a Lannan Foundation fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Joseph Brodsky Memorial fellowship, he taught in the writing program at the University of South Florida.
(Photo credit: Ryan Johnson Photography)