Tony Hoagland

His poetry collection, What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

[2] His father was an Army doctor, so Hoagland grew up on various military bases in Hawaii, Alabama, Ethiopia, and Texas.

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.

[1][2] 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)".

"[1] In 2010, Dwight Garner, a New York Times critic, wrote of Mr. Hoagland: “His erudite comic poems are backloaded with heartache and longing, and they function, emotionally, like improvised explosive devices: The pain comes at you from the cruelest angles, on the sunniest of days.”[2] Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" article: On February 4, 2011, Claudia Rankine presented a reading[10] critical of how race is handled in Hoagland's poem "The Change"[11] at the Associated Writing Programs Conference.