Judith Hall

Judith Hall is an American poet.

Life
She teaches at the California Institute of Technology, and taught in the MFA program at New England College.

For a time Hall directed the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project and senior program specialist for literary publishing at the NEA. Her work appears in Paris Review Yale Review

Since 1995, she has served as poetry editor of Antioch Review.

Reviews
American Poet: “Judith Hall’s translations of the ancient poet known as J II read as richly researched and imaginatively restored for a contemporary audience. The only catch is that J II never existed. . . For her latest book, Three Trios, Hall concocted the alter ego of J II, a Jewish female poet who lived in the sixth century B.C.E. who wrote the Apocryphal book of Judith as well as a mysterious, coded set of pagan poems associated with the cult of Dionysius. These ‘translations’ emit the same earthiness and sensuality of the best ancient erotic poetry but are framed in Hall’s contemporary language – not stale, but sexy. . . . The book is such a complete forgery that it includes a scholarly introduction to J II and footnotes throughout. All of Hall’s efforts add up to a powerful, imaginative experiment in poetry.”

Washington Times: "In the presence of one's own verbal facility, a poet may discover various methods of making things more difficult for herself. Judith Hall's method is twofold:  She works with extremely difficult ‘material’, such as cancer and the development of mother-daughter relationships, and she calls upon the verse tradition for ways of handling it. . . . Miss Hall makes genuine poems of considerable power." Henry Taylor on Anatomy, Errata, The Washington Times

Gettysburgh Review: "Hall's feminist poetry challenges through psychological authenticity and linguistic struggle -- the assumptions that bind us . . . Insistently clear-eyed and unsentimental, Hall achieves both fluency and linguistic pressures through form. . . . but these forms are never ornamental or derivative. Hall sculpts them to her voice with the precision of Louise Bogan, and with greater inventiveness.  She renovates the tradition of love poetry from within; her sonnet sequences, aubades, and epithalamiums are not just anti-Petrarchen, they reevaluate the terms of discourse between men and women beyond anything heard of in the philosophy of George Meredith or Edna St. Vincent Millay." Bonnie Costello on To Put The Mouth To, The Gettysburg Review

Awards

 * 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship
 * NEA Fellowship
 * Ingram Merrill Fellowship.
 * 1991 National Poetry Series