Rate My Professor Clifton Snider

Clifton Snider was a Lecturer Emeritus in the English Department at California State University, Long Beach, specializing in Literature, where he taught for over three decades until his retirement in 2009. He earned his B.A. with honors in 1969 and M.A. in 1971, both in English Literature from CSULB, and completed his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of New Mexico in 1974, with a dissertation offering a Jungian analysis of Algernon Charles Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse. Snider began teaching part-time at CSULB in 1971 while pursuing his doctorate and later served full-time for 36 years. He pioneered LGBTQ literary studies at the university, designing and teaching the first college course on gays and lesbians in literature in 1996. He offered seminars on Oscar Wilde employing Jungian and Queer criticism and published scholarly articles on authors including W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, Edward Lear, Carson McCullers, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf.

A prolific author, Snider published twelve books of poetry, such as Moonman: New and Selected Poems (2012), The Beatle Bump (2016), and Stubborn Heart: New Poems (2021), along with five novels including Loud Whisper (2000), Bare Roots (2001), Wrestling with Angels: A Tale of Two Brothers (2001), and the historical novel The Plymouth Papers (2014), noted as his fifteenth book. His key scholarly work, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On: A Jungian Interpretation of Literature (1991), applies Jungian theory to queer writers like A.C. Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers, and W.H. Auden. Snider held residence fellowships at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, New York), the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (Taos, New Mexico), and the Karolyi Foundation (Vence, France). He received the inaugural Lorde-Whitman Award in 2018 from OUT LOUD for outstanding achievement in the arts and service to the LGBTQ community. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, his poetry and fiction appeared internationally and were translated into Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish, contributing significantly to contemporary literature.