About Bill Mohr

Bill Mohr’s poems, prose poems and creative prose have appeared in dozens of magazines in the past 40 years, including 5 AM, Antioch Review, Beyond Baroque, Blue Collar Review, Blue Mesa Review, Caliban (On-line), ONTHEBUS, OR, Santa Monica Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Solo Nolo, Sonora Review, Spot, Upstreet, Wormwood Review, and ZYZZYVA. His writing has been featured in over a dozen anthologies. Individual collections of his poetry include Hidden Proofs, Vehemence, Bittersweet Kaleidoscope, and a bi-lingual volume published in Mexico, Pruebas Ocultas (Bonobos Editores, 2015).  In 1993, New Alliance Records released his spoken word collection, Vehemence. In 1997 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He has given featured poetry readings at a multitude of venues, including the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City, the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, the Idyllwild Poetry Festival, and Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California. He also frequently gives talks at major academic conferences, such as the Modern Language Association, the Modernist Studies Association and the American Literature Association.

Mohr has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego and is currently an Associate Professor at California State University, Long Beach. In addition to critical articles in the William Carlos Williams Review and Journal of Beat Studies, his work as a literary historian has appeared in collections of essays published by Cambridge University Press and Temple University Press, as well as translated into Spanish in an anthology from the University of Guadalajara. His highly praised account of West Coast poetry, Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. Mohr has additionally published a number of significant book reviews of avant-garde and post-avant poets in New Review of Literature, Chicago Review and OR magazine.

Prior to embarking on an academic career, Mohr dedicated himself to working as a small press activist based in Los Angeles County. In addition to publishing landmark collections of Los Angeles poets such as The Streets Inside (1978) and Poetry Loves Poetry in 1985, he also brought out books by poets such as Alicia Ostriker, Jim Krusoe, Holly Prado, Kate Braverman, Jim Moore, Harry Northup, Joseph Hansen, and Leland Hickman. Lee Hickman’s book, Great Slave Lake Suite, was nominated by the Los Angeles Times as one of the five best books of poems published in 1980. Mohr was accorded four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in recognition of the quality of his publishing projects. He also received grants from the California Arts Council and the Atlantic-Richfield Foundation. In the early 1990s, he was the producer and host of “Put Your Ears,” a poetry show on Century Cable that featured poets such as Scott Wannberg, Victor Valle, Laurel Ann Bogen, and Doren Robbins. In the Spring, 2013, Mohr delivered a lecture as part of the Bonnie Cashin Lecture Series at UCLA. His editorial archives as editor and publisher of Momentum  magazine (1974-1978) and Momentum Press (1975-1988) are located at the University of California, San Diego.