Born in Berkeley, CA, a graduate of Boston University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Clover is a professor of English Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis, and was the distinguished Holloway poet-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002–2003.^[2]

Clover's given name at birth was Joshua Miller Kaplan but via legal change he took his mother's maiden name. His mother, Carol J. Clover, is the originator of the final girl theory in a book on horror films and a professor emerita at the University of California at Berkeley.

Clover's scholarly books in addition to many articles and book chapters have all in various ways considered changes to daily life, work, politics, and social struggle since the Sixties. Originally studying poetry, music, and film, he has come to focus since the 2008 economic crisis directly on political-economic matters. Basic concerns include the array of changes wrought by deindustrialization in the west, the decline of the United States empire and the future of global capitalism. Particular focuses run from the rise of office work to the nature of financialization, from the world after the end of the Soviet project to the transformations of social movements, all considered within the framework of Marxist value theory, with a particular interest in racialized regimes of power and struggle against state and capital. Riot.Strike.Riot: the New Era of Uprisings, a widely cited study translated into five languages other than English, "offers a decidedly materialist theory of the riot and sketches a unique history of the return of the riot to the center of social struggles";^[3] the Chicago Tribune called it "timely and audacious."^[4]

In addition to his scholarship he has been a journalist since the Nineties. He has contributed columns, often on popular culture and politics, to various journals, including the column "Pop and Circumstance" for The Nation and "Marx and Coca-Cola" for Film Quarterly. He is a former senior writer and editor at the Village Voice and Spin. He has contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other venues, sometimes under the name "Jane Dark."

He has published three volumes of poetry in addition to shorter works for which he has won various prizes and fellowships; poems have been anthologized in multiple volumes and languages, including the Norton Introduction to Literature (10th edition, 2009). His poetry often concerns the life of great cities and the twilight character of late modernity, particularly the way it is entangled with the products of overdeveloped capitalism (especially the pleasures of popular music) and how we will have to forsake all of those pleasures for our freedom. Judith Butler has written that " In this brilliant volume, the fragmented world of a late and lost modernity has its own moving and lucid affect, its forms of aliveness."^[5] Increasingly his work has concerned direct political struggle; as one reviewer noted, "Few books, let alone books of poetry, arrive boasting a blurb from Entertainment Weekly while simultaneously, and aggressively, declaring the attempt to establish a Marxist lyric praxis."^[6] Clover has also translated poetry from the Dutch and French, including the book Tarnac: A Preparatory Act, by Jean-Marie Gleize.^[7]

He is one of the co-founders, along with Jasper Bernes and Juliana Spahr, of the poetry press Commune Editions. In 2020, the press was awarded the American Book Award as the best publisher in the United States.^[8]

Clover has written extensively about the campus movements against tuition increases and student debt, about the Occupy movement, and about free speech and policing both on and off the university campus. In January 2012, he and eleven students at the University of California, Davis, engaged in a sit-in to protest the financial arrangements between U.S. Bank and the university, permanently closing the bank branch along with ending the university's particular arrangements with the bank. The protesters, who became known as the "Davis Dozen," were charged with "obstructing movement in a public place and conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor."^[9] One month before the trial was scheduled to begin, the Davis Dozen accepted a plea deal from the Yolo County District Attorney. Under the terms of that agreement, the protesters received an infraction notice ticket and agreed to perform 80 hours of community service.^[10]

Nick Irvin, in a February 2019 opinion piece for The California Aggie, drew attention to published comments by Clover suggesting he was in favor of killing police.^[11] Among them was the September 2015 SFWeekly interview statement by Clover: "People think that cops need to be reformed. They need to be killed."^[12] Clover also was reported by CBS Sacramento to have tweeted in November 2014 “I am thankful that every living cop will one day be dead, some by their own hand, some by others, too many of old age”, and in December of that year “it’s easier to shoot cops when their backs are turned”.^[13]

In response for all media requests for comment, Clover said only, "On the day that police have as much to fear from literature professors as Black kids do from police, I will definitely have a statement. Until then, I have nothing further to add." In March 2019 California State Assemblyman James Gallagher gathered over 10,000 signatures on a petition calling for Clover to be fired.^[14] UC Davis Chancellor Gary May replied in a letter to Gallagher that "Professor Clover’s statements, although offensive and abhorrent, do not meet the legal requirement for 'true threats' that might exempt them from First Amendment protection. . . . Accordingly, the university will not proceed with review or investigation of concerns regarding Professor Clover’s public statements."^[15]

• Madonna anno domini: Poems. Louisiana State University Press. 1 January 1997. ISBN 978-0-8071-2147-4. Retrieved 30 August 2013.
• The Matrix (British Film Institute, 2004), 128 pp.
• The Totality for Kids. University of California Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-520-24599-0. Retrieved 30 August 2013.
• 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About. University of California Press. 7 October 2009. ISBN 978-0-520-94464-0. Retrieved 30 August 2013.
• Red Epic. Commune Editions, Oakland 2015 ISBN 978-1934639160
• Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. Verso, London & Brooklyn 2016 ISBN 1784780596
• Roadrunner. Duke University Press, Durham 2021.

• Clover on The New Yorker in the Village Voice, 2001 [1]
• Clover on Michel Houellebecq in the Village Voice, 2003 [2]
• Clover on Semiotext(e) in the Village Voice, 2002 [3] Archived 2007-10-07 at the Wayback Machine
• Clover on Courtney Love in the Village Voice, 2004 [4] Archived 2006-01-09 at the Wayback Machine
• Clover on Slavoj Žižek in the Village Voice, 2005 [5]
• Clover on Guy Debord and John Ashbery in the Village Voice, 2005 [6] Archived 2006-08-22 at the Wayback Machine
• Clover on Gus Van Sant in the Village Voice, 2005 [7] Archived 2006-12-30 at the Wayback Machine
• Clover on Charles Reznikoff in The New York Times Book Review, 2006 [8]
• Clover on Charles Baudelaire in The New York Times, December 2006 [9]
• Clover on "France:Still Revolting" in the Village Voice [10] Archived 2006-12-30 at the Wayback Machine
• Clover on Velvet Goldmine in Spin magazine [11]
• Clover on Poetry in the Village Voice [12] Archived 2006-11-08 at the Wayback Machine

• "Good Pop, Bad Pop: Massiveness, Materiality, and the Top 40", anthologized in This is Pop, Harvard University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-674-01321-2 [13]
• "The Rose of the Name", Fence, 1998 [14]

• "Matrix Reloaded," review of The Totality for Kids by Alan Gilbert, Village Voice, 2006. [15] Archived 2006-09-14 at the Wayback Machine
• "Zoned," review of The Totality for Kids by John Palattella, The Boston Review, September/October, 2006. [16]
• Review of The Totality for Kids by Christopher Burawa, CutBank, January 21, 2007. [17]

• Clover wrote a regular reviews column for Spin magazine between 1999 and 2001 called "Show Us Your Hits."
• Clover's article on Poetry was noted by Greil Marcus in his Salon column "Real Life Rock Top Ten"[18]
• Clover co-hosts the podcast Didn't See It, Don't Need To with Sarah Miller

• UC Davis homepage
• American Academy of Poets profile
• Video of Clover reading at Bowery Poetry Club in New York, 2006
• Joshua Clover at Davis Wiki
• Brooke Kroeger (10 November 2004). Passing: When People Can't be who They are. PublicAffairs. pp. 198–. ISBN 978-1-58648-287-9. Retrieved 16 December 2014.
• Claudia Rankine; Lisa Sewell (9 July 2007). "The Pleasures of not merely Circulating". American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics. Wesleyan University Press. pp. 164–. ISBN 978-0-8195-6728-4. Retrieved 30 August 2013.
• Nerys Williams (6 April 2011). "Textured Information:Joshua Clover and Claudia Rankine". Contemporary Poetry. Oxford University Press. pp. 163–. ISBN 978-0-7486-8802-9. Retrieved 30 August 2013.