a b o u t
Dean Rader is a poet, art writer, scholar, and critic who has published widely in the fields of poetry, American Indigenous studies, modern and contemporary art, and visual culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 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. His follow-up book, Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn), was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the Best Poetry Books of 2013. His most recent solo project is Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award.
In 2017, along with Brian Clements and Alexandra Teague, he co-edited Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, and he co-authored a book of collaborative sonnets entitled Suture with the poet Simone Muench.
His scholarly book Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI (University of Texas Press, 2010) won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Studies. Along with Janice Gould, he edited Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (University of Arizona Press) and most recently, with CMarie Fuhrman co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Native Voices: Contemporary Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations (Tupelo Press).
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. Recently, He and Victoria Chang began a collaborative poetry review feature for The Los Angeles Review of Books.. 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. In 2021, he was a finalist for the Nona Balakaian Award from the National Book Critics Circle. On January 1, 2021, he launched the popular video series, Poems that Changed Me.
Rader is a professor in The Department of English and in the Honors College 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, as well as a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Society of Collegiate Scholars. Most recently, he collaborated with the calligrapher Thomas Ingmire on a series of art books that blend the visual and the textual. His newest book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, a collection of poems in which Rader's poems and Twombly's work appear side-by-side, was published in April 2023 by Copper Canyon Press. His work has been supported by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, Princeton University, and Harvard University. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
In 2017, along with Brian Clements and Alexandra Teague, he co-edited Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, and he co-authored a book of collaborative sonnets entitled Suture with the poet Simone Muench.
His scholarly book Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI (University of Texas Press, 2010) won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Studies. Along with Janice Gould, he edited Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (University of Arizona Press) and most recently, with CMarie Fuhrman co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Native Voices: Contemporary Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations (Tupelo Press).
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. Recently, He and Victoria Chang began a collaborative poetry review feature for The Los Angeles Review of Books.. 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. In 2021, he was a finalist for the Nona Balakaian Award from the National Book Critics Circle. On January 1, 2021, he launched the popular video series, Poems that Changed Me.
Rader is a professor in The Department of English and in the Honors College 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, as well as a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Society of Collegiate Scholars. Most recently, he collaborated with the calligrapher Thomas Ingmire on a series of art books that blend the visual and the textual. His newest book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, a collection of poems in which Rader's poems and Twombly's work appear side-by-side, was published in April 2023 by Copper Canyon Press. His work has been supported by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, Princeton University, and Harvard University. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.