Tony Hoagland

Anthony Dey Hoagland (November 19, 1953 – October 23, 2018) was an American poet. His poetry collection, What Narcissism Means to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors included two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He was educated at Williams College, the University of Iowa (B.A.) and the University of Arizona (M.F.A.). According to the novelist Don Lee, Hoagland "attended and dropped out of several colleges, picked apples and cherries in the Northwest, lived in communes, followed the Grateful Dead and became a Buddhist." Hoagland was married to Kathleen Lee, author of fiction, essays and travel writings. They had no children. He died in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 23, 2018 from pancreatic cancer at the age of 64.

Literary influences and praise In an interview with Miriam Sagan about his poetic influences, Hoagland said, "if I were going to place myself on some aesthetic graph, my dot would be equidistant between Sharon Olds and Frank O’Hara, between the confessional (where I started) and the social (where I have aimed myself)".

In a 2002 citation regarding Hoagland's award in Literature, The American Academy of Arts and Letters said that "Hoagland's imagination ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, and kinds of speech lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild." awarded by Poets & Writers 2005 O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize awarded by John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 1997 James Laughlin Award Academy of American Poets for Donkey Gospel 1994 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry from Ploughshares for Sweet Ruin 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry critical of how race is handled in Hoagland's poem "The Change" at the Associated Writing Programs Conference. Hoagland issued an open letter in response.