Erin Hoover is the author of two poetry collections: Barnburner and No Spare People.
Out soon from Black Lawrence Press, No Spare People asks: what happens to the woman no longer willing to live a lie? How does language invent not only identity, but possibility?
Publication date: October 20, 2023
$14.95 preorder price
A book about peril—and joy
“Erin Hoover’s second collection, No Spare People, recalls to me the sobering effect of encountering Adrienne Rich’s work in the late ’80s. These poems deal in reality, eschewing the fantastic. … Having long played by rules so detrimental to her selfhood, the speaker of these poems shares her unvarnished truth: ‘I want to be able to talk to people / without having to f— or be f—ed, yeah?’ Hell, yeah.”
— Cate Marvin
“These are hard poems in that they press far past the facile reductive binaries of good and evil, savior and saved, and into something—a lyric, a voice—that feels a little more complicated, a little more like our own world.
— Kaveh Akbar
“The poems in No Spare People illuminate the injustices of income inequality, misogyny, womanhood and motherhood in America with an expanse of time and geography. The voices of these poems arrive at their questions and epiphanies through vivid and self-aware language: ‘It is tempting to want always to reduce the thing to its detail. To make it small.’ Read this book. Expand.'”
— K. Iver
“[These] poems do not give up, continually questioning the constraints of an American South in which ‘some days, I’m the pioneer wife, / keeper of the homestead, but others / I’m absurdly educated for a uterus.’”
— Jessica Jacobs
Download media kit | Get author email updates
Now booking
Erin is now booking for university, festival, and other reading and speaking engagements in Fall 2023 and Spring 2024.
Topics include: poetry, hybrid forms, narrative writing, motherhood, the American South, literary magazine editing and publishing, intersectional feminism, creative writing pedagogy
About the author
Erin Hoover teaches creative writing and literary editing as an assistant professor of English at Tennessee Tech University.
She curates and hosts the in-person poetry reading series Sawmill Poetry and produces the “Not Abandon, But Abide” interview series for the Southern Review of Books.
Her debut collection, Barnburner, won Elixir Press’s Antivenom Award and a Florida Book Award in Poetry.
Hoover lives in middle Tennessee with her family but was born and raised in central Pennsylvania. In addition to teaching, she’s worked as an editor, journalist, fundraiser, and public relations director.
Cover art by Ever Baldwin
Author photo by Keistyn Steward