Poems by Al Shoaf

For a copy of this collection apply directly to me at al@alshoaf.com
  • R. Allen Shoaf (Al) has been writing poetry for over 60 years. He has published several chapbooks: Simple Rules, Pied-Piper Philology, Erotic Reckonings, Language to Live In, Call Me Queequeg, Ishmael. Currently, he is working on several others, collecting poems written in response to the works of Borges, Dostoevsky, Horace, Juvenal, Montaigne, Ovid, Tokarczuk, and Tolstoy, among others.
  • Recently, he completed a lengthy meditation in verse, Mindfulness: A Poetics, semi-autobiographical and literary-theoretical in form and content. In 2022, he published Selected Poems 1968-2021, a collection of several hundred poems.

  • During his academic career (he retired from the University of Florida in 2016), he published books on Dante, Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, Shakespeare, and Milton, in addition to numerous articles in various journals. He received six teaching awards during his career, including University-Wide Teacher of the Year (1992). He held the Alumni Professorship in English from 1990-1993. His scholarly books are available digitally at https://ufdc.ufl.edu/results?q=Shoaf.

  • He graduated summa cum laude from Wake Forest University (1970). He was a Secretary of State George C. Marshall Scholar (1970-72), a Woodrow Wilson Fellow (1970), and a Danforth Fellow (1972-76). He earned his PhD at Cornell University in 1977. He held two Fellowships of the National Endowment for the Humanities — 1982 and 1999. He founded the prize-winning journal Exemplaria in 1989 and edited it for 20 years.