Hardison Prize judge Michael Collier calls Tony Hoagland's work "always interesting because it is never complacent, because it is always scrutinizing itself for falseness."
His poems are often heard on The Writer's Almanac and were most recently collected in What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other published books of poems, including Donkey Gospel, winner of the 1997 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Sweet Ruin, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry.
Of his most recent work, the New York Times Book Review notes, "Hoagland's central subject is the self, specifically, a prickly, grandiose American masculine poetic self, or to be more specific still, what the author ruefully labels in one poem 'a government called Tony Hoagland.' "
Hoagland has also published widely as an essayist, contributing regularly to journals such as American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review.
He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston.
