Charles Hood (born 1959, Los Angeles) is a poet, naturalist, wildlife photographer, and Professor Emeritus of English at Antelope Valley College in California's Mojave Desert, where he taught for 32 years. He holds a B.A. from California State University, Northridge and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of California, Irvine, where he studied under Charles Wright and Louise Gluck, and he is a Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art and Environment in Reno.

Hood has written more than twenty books across poetry, fiction, and natural history. His poetry collection South x South: Poems from Antarctica (Ohio University Press, 2013) won the 2012 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, and Partially Excited States (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017) won the 2016 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His natural-history books for Heyday include Wild LA, A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat: The Joys of Ugly Nature, and Nocturnalia: Nature in the Western Night. He has held a Fulbright Scholarship in Ethnopoetics in Papua New Guinea and a National Science Foundation Artists and Writers fellowship in Antarctica, and he has observed more than 6,000 bird species and 1,000 mammal species in the wild.

His one JEF Books title is the novel Mouth (2017), illustrated by Christine Mugnolo, which won the 2016 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, the prize the press awards each year to an adventurous unpublished novel. It is the only book of fiction Hood has published, set against a poetry career that runs from California State University, Northridge and the University of California, Irvine to fellowships in Antarctica and Papua New Guinea. Read it here: Mouth.

Start with Mouth, his Patchen Award novel and his only book of fiction on the JEF list. View the book.