Jay Rogoff

Jay Rogoff has published seven books of poetry. His debut book, The Cutoff: A Sequence (1995), appeared as winner of the Word Works' Washington Prize. His followup, How We Came to Stand on That Shore (2003), was chosen by Andrew Hudgins for River City Publishing's new poetry series. Since 2008 he has published regularly with Louisiana State University Press, including the poetry collections The Long Fault (2008), The Art of Gravity (2011), Venera (2014), Enamel Eyes, A Fantasia on Paris, 1870 (2016), and, most recently, Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems (2020). His collection of essays about poetry, Becoming Poetry: Poets and Their Methods (2023), also appeared from LSU Press and won the Lewis P. Simpson Memorial Award for an outstanding book of American literary criticism. His poetry and criticism has appeared in many journals, including Able Muse, AGNI, Field, The Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review,  The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, Literary Matters, The New Criterion, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Partisan Review, The Progressive, Salmagundi, The Southern Review, and The Yale Review. 

For many years Rogoff has also written about dance, a subject that suffuses two of his  poetry books, The Art of Gravity and Enamel Eyes. His dance criticism has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review, and he has contributed regularly on dance to Ballet Review, The Hopkins Review (where he reviewed dance for 13 years), and Salmagundi.

Born in New York City, Rogoff graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, the University of Pennsylvania (BA in English, 1975), and Syracuse University (MA in Creative Writing, 1978; DA in English, 1981). He has taught at Syracuse, LeMoyne College, and Skidmore College, where he worked for 33 years, retiring in 2018. He is married to art historian Penny Jolly and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.