Education
Degrees in Judaic Studies and English literature from Brandeis University, and a Doctor of Philosophy in English from the University of California at Berkeley.
Degrees in Judaic Studies and English literature from Brandeis University, and a Doctor of Philosophy in English from the University of California at Berkeley.
She is a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California. Bloch earned her Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University, her Master of Arts She taught at Mills College for over thirty years and directed their Creative Writing Program. Bloch has held residencies at the Bellagio Center for Scholars and Artists, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program.
She has given lectures and poetry readings at numerous United States. colleges and universities.
Bloch has published four collections of her poetry: The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Dumpty and Blood Honey. She is the poetry editor of Persimmon Tree, an online journal of the arts by women over sixty.
She is co-translator, with Ariel Bloch, of The Song of Songs. She translated 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.
Bloch is also the author of the critical study, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible.
Chana"s Story, a song cycle by David Delegate Tredici based on her work, premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Jorge Liderman"s cantata, The Song of Songs, based on her translation, was performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the University of California Berkeley Chamber Chorus at Cal Performances. Her translation of the Song of Songs was named as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year.
Her 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.
She has lived in Berkeley, California since 1967.
Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation and included in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize and other anthologies. Bloch won the Poetry Society of America"s Di Castagnola Award for Blood Honey. The Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry for Mistress Dumpty. And the Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association Award for Poetry in Translation, together with Chana Kronfeld, for Open Closed Open.
