James Hoggard, 1941-2021, was born in Wichita Falls, Texas to Reverend Earl and Helen Hoggard. After completing his MA in English at the University of Kansas, he worked briefly as a writer for Wichita Falls Record News before beginning his tenure a professor at Midwestern State University in 1966. Over the course of his 48 year teaching career, he earned the honorifics of Hardin Professor in 1977, McMurtry Distinguished Professor of Excellence in 1997, and in 2001 was named the Perkins-Prothro Distinguished Professor of English. Hoggard also headed the Midwestern State University Press for 29 years. He served as project manager and editor in the publication of twenty-two books related to American literature, performing arts, regional history, and natural science.

Outside of his teaching career, Hoggard was an accomplished writer with an expansive body of work encompassing poetry, translations, fiction, nonfiction, drama, feature writing, columns, and reviews. Over the course of his lifetime, he wrote twenty-three books, including six collections of translations, three of them of collections of poems by Óscar Hahn (b. 1938, Chile). He also published more than 300 poems, more than thirty short stories, and approximately sixty essays and nonfiction works. His work has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, Ohio Review, Southwest Review, Translation Quarterly, the Texas Observer, the Times Herald, Texas Monthly, and numerous other journals and anthologies. Many of his works were reviewed and edited with assistance from his wife, award-winning poet, author, translator, and fellow professor emerita from Midwestern State University, Dr. Lynn Hoggard.

In addition to being named the Texas Poet Laureate in 2000, Hoggard was the winner of numberous awards, including the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship; the Hart Crane and Alice Crane Williams Memorial Fund Award for Poetry; publication in Best American Short Stories; the PEN Texas Poetry Award; Souerette Diehl Fraser Translation Award from the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters; and the Lon Tinkle Award for Excellence Sustained Throughout a Career from the Texas Institute of Letters. He was elected to become a member of the Texas Institute of Letters in 1979, and later served as its president, secretary and treasurer in various years.

In Wichita Falls, Hoggard served on the boards of the Wichita Falls Symphony and the Wesley Foundation, and was a dedicated member of the Wichita Falls First United Methodist Church for many years. In that time, he wrote the lyrics to eleven anthems set to music by Kiyo Watanabe and performed by the First United Methodist Church choir. Later in life, Hoggard was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and passed away in February 2021.