Baker Artist Portfolios

Matt Hohner, a Baltimore native, holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where he studied under legendary Beat Generation poets Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka, Joanne Kyger, and others, as well as renowned poets, translators, scholars, and writers including Anselm Hollo, Jane Hirshfield, Andrew Schelling, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Pierre Joris, Jerome Rothenberg, Sam Hamill, Wanda Coleman, Arthur Sze, and many others.

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 (published 2024), 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 of At the Edge of a Thousand Years by Bethany Reid at Escape into Life.

Sadly, without notification or explanation, Jacar Press rendered Hohner's book out of print as soon as it was printed and made available in March 2024. The only copies available for sale are directly from him. Please contact Hohner via his website in order to purchase a signed copy of his book.

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.

Hohner's 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 led poetry and creative writing workshops at the secondary and undergraduate levels, at Creative Alliance in Baltimore, online via Zoom and in person with the Eastern Shore Writers Association (ESWA), and recently with ESWA in March 2024 at their annual Bay to Ocean Conference. In June 2024, Hohner led a workshop for Poetry Day at Manor Mill in Monkton, MD, and in November 2024, Hohner presented "Publication Dos and Don'ts" at the Manor Mill Delight in Writing Day. He will be returning to Poetry Day at Manor Mill to lead an experimental poetry workshop in May 2025.

Author pic by Mel Edden.