Bill Mohr is a professor emeritus at California State University, Long Beach, where he has taught since 2006, after receiving his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego in 2004. In 2011, the University of Iowa Press published Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992. His reviews, articles, and commentary have also appeared in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry, Poetry Flash, Journal of Beat Studies, Chicago Review, William Carlos Williams Review, Poetry Project Newsletter, Hungry Mind Review, New Review of Literature, OR, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and Beyond Baroque NEW.
Mohr has a chapter on L.A. poetry forthcoming in a volume entitled “L.A.: A Literary History” from Cambridge University Press in 2026 as well as an essay forthcoming in a CUP volume celebrating the centenary of Allen Ginsberg’s birth. Prior to his career as an academic, Mohr made his living at various occupations, including working as a blueprint machine operator and typesetter. During this time, he was the editor and publisher of Momentum Press, which he founded in 1974 (www.koankinship.com)
In addition to being translated into Spanish, Italian, Croatian, and Japanese, Mohr’s poems have appeared in over 20 anthologies. Mohr’s most recent full-length collection of poems is a bilingual edition, The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana (What Books, Los Angeles, 2018). What Books will publish Remiges: Collected Longer Poems in the fall 2026.
Mohr has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute and been honored with Beyond Baroque’s George Drury Smith Award. His literary and editorial archives are at the Archive for New Poetry in the Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego.
