Dean Rader

About this Speaker

Dean Rader has published widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and visual culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the Bob Bush Memorial Award for a First Book of Poems, and won the 2010 Writer's League of Texas Poetry Prize. Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn), was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the Best Poetry Books of 2013.

Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence  (Beacon Press, 2017) is a groundbreaking anthology co-edited with Brian Clements and Alexandra Teague. This compilation of poems and responses brings together the voices of poets and citizens most impacted to call for the end of gun violence with the activist power of poetry. It has been featured in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Washington Post, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets.

Rader is the co-author of a best-selling book on writing and popular culture, The World is a Text (with Jonathan Silverman), which recently entered its fifth edition. With poet Janice Gould, he co-edited Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2003), the first collection of essays devoted to Native American poetry. He also curated a special issue of Sentence that focused on American Indian prose poetry. His most recent book is Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversation (Tupelo, 2019), edited by CMarie Fuhrman. This genre-altering anthology features poems and craft essays from forty-four poets, including Layli Long Soldier, Bojan Louis, Ruby Murray, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahonso, Joy Harjo, dg okpik, Sherwin Bitsui, Heid E. Erdrich, Orlando White, Elise Paschen, Michael Wasson, Carter Revard, LeAnne Howe, Louise Erdrich, and many others.

Rader writes and reviews regularly for The Huffington Post ,The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Ploughshares, The San Francisco Chronicle; ​and BOMB.  His series of pieces on the 10 Greatest Poets was covered byThe New Yorker, The New York Times and dozens of other media outlets. He recently wrote about teaching poetry post-truth and post-Trump;" and was interviewed by The Washington Post on the convergence of poetry and politics.

Rader earned his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton where he studied comparative literature, creative writing, translation, American Indian literature, and visual culture. He is a professor of English; at the University of San Francisco, where he has won the University's Distinguished Research Award and the College of Arts & Sciences' Dean's Scholar Award. At present, he is at work on a series of poems that enter into conversation with the work of Cy Twombly. His work has been supported by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Princeton University, and Harvard University. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.