Richard “RICHIE” HOFMANN, is an American poet, Guggenheim Fellow, winner of the Alice James Award, and the Pushcart Prize. He is regularly published in The New Yorker, and has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. Hofmann was the Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University, where he taught poetry and creative writing courses.

He spent his early childhood in Munich, which he cites as formative in his exploration of the concept of time, and his relationship to Europe within poetry.

He has contributed to The New Yorker since 2013, including audio readings for the online portion of the magazine. In interviews Hofmann often cites music, in particular opera and musicals, as having a strong influence on his life and work. He has described Sondheim’s music as “the rock of my life”, and wrote the poem “Birthday” as a tribute to Mozart. Hofmann collaborated with the composer Brian Baxter to write the lyrics for the piece “Old World Elegy” for voice and string quartet. The world premier was held in Chicago, hosted by the Poetry Foundation, and won the Memorious Art Song Contest of 2013.

Hofmann’s work often explores male desire, and relationship to the body. Comparisons drawn between his work and that of the late French autofiction writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, led Hofmann to write more “intensely, in a way which was more vulgar”. He also frequently includes classical themes and images in his poetry.

In 2015 Hofmann published his first collection of poems, titled “Second Empire” with Alice James Books which became critically acclaimed including the Pushcart Prize for poetry. That year he also co-founded Lightbox Poetry, an online educational resource for creative writing, with fellow poet Kara van de Graaf. One of his most widely known poems is “Book of Statues”, about the hate crime murder of Matthew Shepard in October 1998. The poem was first published by the Academy of American Poets Poem-a Day on October 12, 2016. On the twentieth remembrance of Matthew Shepard’s murder in 2018, The New York Times featured his poem with a reading by actor Matt Bomer.

Hofmann published his second poetry collection “A Hundred Lovers” in 2022 with Random House. The book was featured in the list of top “46 Must-Read Books by Queer Writers” in Esquire Magazine.

In 2025 it was announced that Hofmann’s new book of poems is titled “The Bronze Arms”, forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. In 2025, Hoffman was named a Guggenheim Fellow and awarded a Literature Fellowship from National Endowment for the Arts.

Hofmann is married to Ryan Hagerty to whom his first book, Second empire, is dedicated.