Clifton Mark Snider (born March 3, 1947, and died October 24, 2021) was an American poet, novelist, literary critic, scholar, and educator.

By the age of twelve, Snider had lived in Minnesota; Joliet, Illinois; Terre Haute, Indiana; and several cities in southern California.

He went to Southern California College (an Assemblies of God institution now called Vanguard University) on music and academic scholarships.

Snider's shorter pieces of criticism have appeared in many periodicals, among them The Advocate, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, and the Los Angeles Times.

In the midst of the presidential election during the fall semester of 2004 at Cal State Long Beach, Snider became involved in a national controversy over academic freedom when two of his students, a young woman and a young man, went on Fox News to complain about Snider's comments the first night of a freshman composition class.

Because his emphasis in a class that is supposed to promote critical thinking about controversial issues was on morality and spirituality, Snider used the war in Iraq as an example of immorality.

The student became a spokesperson for Horowitz, writing numerous articles for right-wing blogs and other web sites and appearing again on national television on Paul Gigot's The Journal Editorial Report[7] on September 23, 2005, which at that time was on PBS.

Not allowed to respond to his former student's accusations on the Gigot program or on its web site, Snider, who had felt constrained by his employer to keep silent, finally told his side of the story on Insidehighered.com.

[8] His former student was claiming Snider had been unfair to her by giving her a "B" on a paragraph she wrote on the film Fahrenheit 9/11 when she had been achieving a "straight-A record" in the class.

"[9] His first chapbook, Jesse Comes Back (1976), was followed by the elegiac Bad Smoke Good Body (1980), written for the poet's older brother, Evan, who had disappeared under circumstances indicating foul play in October 1976.

Much of his work concerns the foreign places he's visited, and though his home is Long Beach, California, the spiritual core of his poetry is often centered in New Mexico, with its rich mixture of Native, Hispanic, and Anglo cultures.

[12] Robert Peters examines Snider's work in a chapter titled "Poems for an Autobiography" in The Great American Poetry Bake-off (1987).

Of the same book, Richard Labonte writes in the national gay and lesbian magazine, The Advocate: "Southern California poet Clifton Snider explores the unexpected, the near tragic, and the adventurous.

He announces the return of the Goddess after centuries of patriarchal dominance," Small Press Review[14]) and Marilyn Johnson ("Out of ... profound insight and spiritual wisdom he ... has created an offering, a magnificent poetic vision, a prayer-book for the coming New Age," Pearl[15]).

Two poems from this collection, "Le Mont Saint- Michel" and "Honey from Heaven," won "In the Spotlight" awards from the online magazine, The Poetry Page, in 1999.

His much-anticipated career retrospective, covering his 40 years of publishing history, Moonman: New and Selected Poems, came out from World Parade Books in the spring of 2012.

In the national online journal, Lambda Literary, Tony Leuzzi writes, "Moonman traces Snider's fluid movement from one idiom to another: restrained poems in traditional forms; intellectual utterances that demonstrate his awareness of Western and Eastern philosophical systems; chatty, casual poems that respond to aspects of popular culture; and, most impressively, concise and memorable imagist verse.

[In Edwin: A Character in Poems] the persona functions as an effective objective correlative whose dual obsessions with thought and body echo a whole generation of gay men.

Snider draws on his background in Jungian and Queer criticism to create a unique and refreshing book of poetry and prose (there are two fan letters) about the Beatles.

Loud Whisper chronicles the frontman for an 80's rock band who, drunk and drugged out, falls from stage during a concert and becomes paralyzed.

The short novel examines the relationships between the 17th-century English settlers of Plymouth Colony and the native peoples they encountered, with a frame character from the 19th century who discovers the papers.