15 Facts About Chana Bloch

Chana Bloch was an American poet, translator, and scholar.

Chana Bloch was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Chana Bloch's father was a dentist, and her mother a homemaker.

Chana Bloch taught at Mills College for over thirty years and directed their Creative Writing Program.

Chana Bloch gave lectures and poetry readings at numerous US colleges and universities.

Chana Bloch published five collections of her poetry: The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs Dumpty, Blood Honey.

Chana Bloch's work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation and included in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize and other anthologies.

Chana Bloch was the poetry editor of Persimmon Tree, an online journal of the arts by women over sixty.

Chana Bloch was a co-translator, with Ariel Bloch, of the biblical Song of Songs.

Chana Bloch translated works by modern Hebrew poets including The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai with Stephen Mitchell, and Amichai's Open Closed Open, as well as Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch with Chana Kronfeld.

Chana Bloch was the author of the critical study, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible.

Jorge Liderman's cantata, The Song of Songs, based on her and Chana Bloch's translation, was performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus at Cal Performances.

Chana Bloch had two grown sons, Benjamin and Jonathan, from her marriage to Ariel Bloch, a former professor of Semitic Linguistics at UC Berkeley.

Chana Bloch died on May 19,2017, after a prolonged battle with cancer.

Chana Bloch's awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, in poetry and in translation, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Discovery Award of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center.