Bio
Jeff Knorr b. 1966
Sacramento Poet Laureate 2012-2016
Jeff Knorr is the author of five books of poetry, Fire Season (Flowersong Press) The Color of a New Country (Mammoth Books), The Third Body (Cherry Grove Collections), Keeper (Mammoth Books), and Standing Up to the Day (Pecan Grove Press). His other works include Mooring Against the Tide: Writing Poetry and Fiction (Prentice Hall); the anthology, A Writer's Country (Prentice Hall); and The River Sings: An Introduction to Poetry (Prentice Hall). His poetry and essays have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies including Chelsea, Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, The Journal, North American Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Barrow Street, and Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America.
Jeff was the Poet Laureate for the city and county of Sacramento from 2012-2016. He has edited, judged, and been a visiting writer for various conferences and festivals. He was the founding co-editor and poetry editor of the Clackamas Literary Review. He has also been an invited judge for contests such as the DeNovo First Book Contest, the Willamette Award in Poetry and the Red Rock Poetry Award. He has appeared as a visiting writer at such venues and festivals as Wordstock, University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writer’s House, The Des Moines Festival of Literary Arts, and CSU Sacramento’s Summer Writers Conference.
Jeff sits on the nominating committee of the Borchard Foundation Center for Literary Arts. He also is the Academic Director for the Re-Emerging Scholars Program, a re-entry degree program for post-incarcerated students, at Sacramento City College. And he directs the River City Writer’s Series.
Jeff Knorr lives in Sacramento, California with his wife, Maria Alvarez, and he is Professor of literature and creative writing at Sacramento City College.
My writing roots
I got started writing when I was a young boy fishing with my grandfather, pictured above. This was my foray into language and paying attention--one of the most important skills a writer needs. My grandfather had a stroke which affected the language center of his brain. He slurred and struggled with words, but because we spent so much time together at my young age of 4 I happened to be able to understand him. Moreover we spent long periods of silence together. I look back at these days as the first notions I had of the importance of choosing the right word, of compression of language, of being able to communicate with sparing language. As we spent days together at Lake Chabot in Castro Valley, CA, I began to recognize and pay close attention to the beauty of the natural world and also to appreciate the mysteries of what I could not see underwater, inside my grandfather, and in the world. Language for me became a way to see the reality behind reality. What I know now is that language is the way in which we continually position and reposition ourselves in the world.
Style & Influences
My poetry is lyric poetry that uses narrative as a vehicle. While nature has always provided me with triggering subjects, so too has family and love. I find that I wrestle constantly with how we live together and maintain our equilibrium with each other despite intense social and political forces at work. I appreciate where story takes me in a poem, but ultimately I'm concerned in that nearly ineffable moment we capture in the in-between spaces of the world. My earliest and most profound influence in poetry was James Wright. Still to this day he is one of my favorite American poets. I also count among major influences on my work Jim Harrison, Gary Thompson, and William Stafford. More recent influences that have profoundly shaped my current writing include Terrance Hayes, Patricia Smith, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Jimmy Baca, and Phil Levine.
