Joshua Clover

Poet, scholar, and journalist Joshua Clover was born in Berkeley, California. An alumnus of Boston University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Clover published several volumes of poetry, including Red Epic (Commune Editions, 2015), The Totality for Kids (University of California Press, 2006), and Madonna anno domini (Louisiana State University Press, 1997), winner of the 1996 Walt Whitman Award (known now as the Academy of American Poets First Book Award). His poems also appeared three times in the Best American Poetry series. He also wrote books of cultural and political theory: Riot.Strike.Riot (Verso Books, 2016), 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About (University of California Press, 2009), and The Matrix (British Film Institute, 2021).

Clover received an individual NEA grant and served as a senior fellow at the Paris Diderot University and the Institute for Advanced Study at Warwick University. He was a professor of critical and political theory in the English and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Davis, and a columnist for The Nation and Ny Tid, in Norway. Clover was a founding editor of Commune Editions.

Clover died on April 26, 2025.