“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, on No Spare People
About the poet
Erin Hoover is the author of three poetry collections: Barnburner (Elixir, 2018), No Spare People (Black Lawrence, 2023), and Consent (Black Lawrence, May 2027). Her debut, Barnburner, won Elixir Press’s Antivenom Award and a Florida Book Award in Poetry.
Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and in journals including Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Narrative, The Sun, Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah.
Hoover teaches creative writing and literary editing as an associate professor of English at Tennessee Tech University. She curates and hosts the in-person poetry reading series Sawmill Poetry, produces the “Not Abandon, But Abide” interview series for Southern Review of Books, and serves as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Cookeville, Tennessee, through December 31, 2027.
She lives in middle Tennessee with her family, and was born and raised in central Pennsylvania. Alongside teaching, she has worked as an editor, journalist, fundraiser, and public relations director. In 2025 she was program chair for the Appalachian Studies Association Conference, hosted that year at Tennessee Tech.
Honors
Antivenom Award & Florida Book Award
for Barnburner (Elixir Press)
Anthologized
Keystone Poetry, 2025
Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania
The Collections
Black Lawrence Press · May 2027
A third collection of poems tracing the day-to-day realities of coercive control, power dynamics and the volatility of traumatic memory.
“Hoover opens the body’s story and lets the light touch it.” — Traci Brimhall
More about ConsentBlack Lawrence Press · 2023
Poems on the materials of motherhood, labor, and care — and an argument that everyone is essential, with truly no one to spare. A Lambda Literary “Most Anticipated” title.
“Erin Hoover’s second collection, No Spare People, recalls to me the sobering effect of encountering Adrienne Rich’s work in the late ’80s.” — Cate Marvin
More about No Spare PeopleElixir Press · 2018
Selected by Kathryn Nuernberger for Elixir Press’s Antivenom Award, and winner of a Florida Book Award. A first collection about class, inheritance, and the American service economy.
“Hoover exhumes the skeletons buried neatly behind the white picket fences of modern America.” — Publishers Weekly
More about BarnburnerThe second collection
Black Lawrence Press · 2023
No Spare People documents the joys and perils of a tiny mother-daughter family navigating life on the margins. From poems about finding autonomy as a queer, unpartnered parent by choice in the South to those chronicling a generation’s economic instability, Hoover rejects so-called “acceptable losses” stemming from inequalities of gender, race, and class. The book asks: what happens to the woman no longer willing to live a lie? How does language invent not only identity, but possibility? A Lambda Literary “Most Anticipated” title, with cover art by Ever Baldwin.
In review
“No Spare People is gorgeous, with a philosophical throughline and an embracing of conceptual work in poems that, yes, has the kind of swagger many of us find attractive as queer, femme intellectuals. The single mother, poet-professor, speaker of the poems in No Spare People writes in the knowledge of the material and political conditions of her poems, questioning and describing and naming web of power relationships and around herself and her child, opening up, potentially, space for living beyond those structures.”
Han VanderHart
“The first poem in Erin Hoover’s latest collection, No Spare People, ends with the line: ‘I open my throat’ — a fierce opening to a book seething with anger and love. These poems reflect the contradictions, complications, and heartbreak of living in the world, particularly as a woman and as a mother. They are sharp, determined, tender, and open.”
Chelsea Risley, Southern Review of Books
“Hoover’s poems insist on claiming their own space. Within these spaces arise thoughtful, nuanced observations and confrontations.”
Emily Choate, Chapter 16
Reviews & interviews about No Spare People
Chapter 16 Sundress Reads Heavy Feather Review Midwest Book Review Scene4 Southern Review of Books interview The Nerd Cantina
This isn’t a confession but the facts that surround us, as everyone has, and once my child’s fake father was gone, I thanked the clerk and ran through the parking lot through the gathered, hissing geese. I drove home, opened my shirt, and on that spring day, fed my child.
from “At the Child Support Office”
The debut
Elixir Press · 2018
According to an old story, there was once a Dutchman who was so bothered by rats that he burned down the barn to get rid of them. Thus a barn burner became one who destroyed all in order to get rid of a nuisance.
Epigraph — Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins
“There is honesty in this epigraph, raw and brutal, like the narrative voices in Hoover’s poems. But there’s an irony at play here, an irony perhaps borrowing a bit from the ironies of Frost’s “Mending Wall”: Hoover’s poems don’t burn down the cruelties of a homogeneous, racist patriarchy. Instead, they make a muse of it. A muse that can be objectified, stripped bare, and put on a pedestal for all to scorn.”
Kathryn Nuernberger
In review
“Hoover exhumes the skeletons buried neatly behind the white picket fences of modern America in a debut that is rife with outspoken disillusionment. … [This] candid portrait of normalized cruelty is likely to get readers to question their own malignant perceptions and passivity in the face of injustice.”
Publishers Weekly
“Hoover’s debut poetry collection is a fitting attempt to kick down staid, prim, even academic poetic doors.”
Booklist
“Erin Hoover’s supple, lucid voice, her storytelling skill, and the sheer linguistic and emotional intelligence of her poems make it hard to believe that Barnburner is a first book. There are poems here about bad jobs, environmental threat, about having or not having children, about sex, violence and many kinds of coercion, and maybe most of all about helplessness and control: who has control, how do we go out of control, how do we find our way back — if we do. A political, personal, and timely book”
Daisy Fried
Work
Readings & appearances
Hoover reads at festivals, universities, bookstores, and libraries, and hosts Sawmill Poetry in Cookeville. She is booking university, festival, and other reading and speaking engagements for 2026 and 2027.
TopicsPoetry · hybrid forms · narrative writing · writing about trauma · the American South · literary magazine editing and publishing · intersectional feminism · creative writing pedagogy
Invite Erin to read
Upcoming
Ongoing
Selected past appearances
The reading series
Sawmill Poetry is the reading series Erin curates and hosts in Cookeville, Tennessee, at Plenty Downtown Bookshop. Visiting poets and writers from the region read new work to a room that came out on purpose — no lectern, no ceremony, the poems close enough to hear the paper move.
Free and open to the public. Poets interested in reading, and hosts interested in bringing the series to their venue, are welcome to write.
Hosted by
Plenty Downtown Bookshop Cookeville, Tennessee
When
First Monday of the month
Admission
Free
Press kit
Bios, photography, publication history and press materials for editors, journalists, festivals and event hosts.
01 — Short bio
Erin Hoover is the author of the poetry collections Barnburner (Elixir, 2018), No Spare People (Black Lawrence, 2023), and Consent (Black Lawrence, 2027). She teaches creative writing and literary editing as an associate professor of English at Tennessee Tech University. She curates the Sawmill Poetry reading series and produces the “Not Abandon, But Abide” interview series for Southern Review of Books. Barnburner won Elixir Press’s Antivenom Award and a Florida Book Award in Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of Cookeville, Tennessee, through December 31, 2027.
02 — Portraits
Photo credit: Joshua Ferg.
03 — Publication history
Invitations
Erin accepts a limited number of engagements each semester. Please reach out to request her availability.
Press & publicity julia@juliapublicity.com Julia Borcherts, Julia Publicity
