Chana Bloch

Chana Bloch (March 15, 1940 – May 19, 2017) was an American poet, translator, and scholar. She was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Early life and education Born as Florence Ina Faerstein in the Bronx, New York, she was a second-generation American, the daughter of Benjamin and Rose (née Rosenberg) Faerstein; her parents were both observant Jews who had immigrated from Ukraine. Bloch later identified herself as a Jewish humanist. Her father was a dentist, and her mother a homemaker. and directed their Creative Writing Program. Bloch held residencies at the Bellagio Center for Scholars and Artists, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She gave lectures and poetry readings at numerous U.S. colleges and universities.

Bloch published five collections of her poetry: The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, Blood Honey. and Swimming in the Rain. A sixth book was published in the Fall 2017, The Moon Is Almost Full. 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 was the poetry editor of Persimmon Tree, an online journal of the arts by women over sixty.

She was a co-translator, with Ariel Bloch, of the biblical Song of Songs. She translated works by modern Hebrew poets including The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Jorge Liderman's cantata, The Song of Songs, based on her and Bloch's translation, was performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus at Cal Performances.

Personal life She lived in Berkeley, California. She had two grown sons, Benjamin and Jonathan, from her marriage to Ariel Bloch, a former professor of Semitic Linguistics at UC Berkeley. She married Dave Sutter in 2003.

Death Chana Bloch died on May 19, 2017, after a prolonged battle with cancer.

Awards and honors Bloch won the Poetry Society of America's Di Castagnola Award for Blood Honey; Yehuda Amichai: The Selected Poetry, with Stephen Mitchell. Harper & Row (1986). Revised and expanded edition, 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, with Ariel Bloch. Sheep Meadow Press (1989) A Dress of Fire, Dahlia Ravikovitch. Sheep Meadow Press (1978)

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