Baker Artist Portfolios

Matt Hohner, a Baltimore native, holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He is an assistant editor for poetry at The Loch Raven Review. Published in nine countries on five continents, Hohner's poetry has garnered numerous local, national, and international awards and recognition. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. In selecting Matt Hohner's manuscript At the Edge of a Thousand Years as the Jacar Press 2023 Full Length Poetry Book Prize, renowned poet Carolyn Forché writes: 

From the opening poem, which could be a response to Nazim Hikmet's 'On Living,' Matt Hohner writes out of the chaos of our present dystopia, in the pre-dawn twilight of another long century/ at the edge of a thousand years. It is as if the uprisings in Tiananmen and Ferguson, Hong Kong and Baltimore were happening all at once, in the half-pipe of the world's end, in poems that begin in the imaginative densities of childhood, and traverse the lived pandemic, the hatching of brood X, the violence that surrounds and permeates our built and natural spheres. The voice is elegiac with an unsentimental edge: to kill is language enough. Certain swerves of syntax and sensibility remind me of the late work of Larry Levis: lines forming sinuous, hypotactic sentences wending through memory into clearings of raw emotional discovery. This is a poet unafraid of risk, as exemplified in "This Poem Has Been Sanitized for Your Protection" and "A Good Guy With A Poem." Very few books hold a mirror to America as this one does.

Click here to read a review Hohner wrote of Anne Waldman's book Sanctuary in Free State Review.

Hohner has worked with artists in Baltimore and Maryland's Eastern Shore in two separate ekphrastic collaborations, and with Dutch composer Brechtje Vandijk (a.k.a. Bec Plexus), for a lyrical adaptation of his poem "How to Unpack a Bomb Vest" for her original musical composition inspired by the poem.

At the Edge of a Thousand Years, his second full-length collection, will be published by Jacar Press in 2024. His first full-length poetry collection Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House Press) was published in Fall 2018. His chapbook States was published by Third Ear Books in 1999. 

Hohner has held two residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, one of which was made possible by a fellowship from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and has a forthcoming residency at the Anam Cara Writers' Retreat in Ireland.

A former public high school English teacher, Hohner has taught poetry and creative writing workshops at the secondary and undergraduate levels, at Creative Alliance in Baltimore, and online via Zoom with the Eastern Shore Writers Association (ESWA). He will be leading forthcoming workshops with ESWA in March 2024 at their annual Bay to Ocean Conference, and in June 2024 for Poetry Day at Manor Mill in Monkton, MD.