s e l e c t e d   e s s a y s  +  o p - e d s   a v a i l a b l e   o n l i n e

• "Poetry, Painting, History, Hermeneutics: On Cy Twombly: Making Past Present" in Jacket2.
• "Will the Circle Be Unbroken: On Telephone as Collaboration," an essay that looks closely at my participation in the global art phenomenon, TELEPHONE.
• Brian Komei Dempster and Dean Rader in conversation on the intersection of poetry, race, covid, and healing in the fabulous Waxwing.
• "Three Poems in Search of Justice: A Postmortem,"  Journal of Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Scholarship: 4, 1-7.​
• ​“Revisiting James Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River at Fifty-one," Ploughshares. June 20, 2019.
• Essay on Joy Harjo's "Perhaps the World Ends Here" for the Poetry Society of America's Reading in the Dark Series.
• Review essay of "Frank O'Hara: Lunchtime Poet," a new gallery in the revamped Museum of Modern Art in Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art. 
• Essay on William Carlos Williams, Cy Twombly, and abstraction in The Kenyon Review
• Essay on Jackson Pollock, Walt Whitman and all-overness as part of North American Review's Every Atom series curated by Brian Clements.
• Review of the remarkable new book A Frank O'Hara Notebook by the late Bill Berkson in The Rumpus.
• Essay on visiting W. S. Merwin in Hawaii for his 90th birthday for The San Francisco Chronicle.
• Dean Rader on Jordan Kantor in BOMB, July 2017.
• "Notes on Banana Palace or Fourteen Ways of Looking at Dana Levin" in Kenyon Review Online, 2017.
• On Teaching Poetry Post-Truth and Post-Trump in The Huffington Post, November, 2016.
• "Elegy as Ecstasy: Rereading Motherwell" in The Los Angeles Review of Books, 2017.
• "The Inaugural Poem under a Trump Presidency: An Adynaton" in Ploughshares, 2016.
• "On Abstraction and Acessibility: Poetry, Perspective, and the Painting of Jordan Kantor" in Ploughshares, 2016.
• "Invisible Priest: Contemporary American Poetry and the Echo of Stevens" in American Poets, ​The Journal of the Academy of American Poetry, 2016.
• "What is the Most Underrated American Poem?" in Ploughshares, 2016.
• The Politics of Poetry, The Poetry of Politics: On Claudia Rankine's Citizen in The Huffington Post, ​2015.
• "Uttering the Holy: On Poetry and Politics" in The Huffington Post
• "In A Sea of Information, Literacy A Life Jacket" in The San Francisco Chronicle, (Op-Ed)
• "The New Poet Laureate: On Philip Levine" in The San Francisco Chronicle
• "Politics and Poetry: Do They Really Ever Meet in America?" in The Huffington Post
• "Big Loves: Rader on Stevens." Essay on Wallace Stevens' poem "The Man on the Dump" for Memorious.
• "British Publisher Touts American Indian Poets." Essay on the Salt Earthworks Series in The San Francisco Chronicle, September 2008.
• "Fabricated Memoirs Defy Reader's Expectations." Op-ed in the Oakland Tribune Newspapers (pdf)
• "American Icon." Op-ed on Barack Obama as pop culture icon in The San Francisco Chronicle, July 2008.
• "Core Value." Op-ed piece on the Harvard University core curriculum in The San Francisco Chronicle, July 2007.

s e l e c t e d   b l o g   p o s t s

• Are There Iconic Contemporary American Poems? (From The Best American Poetry Blog)
• Is San Francisco To Poetry What New York Is To Fiction? (From The Best American Poetry Blog)
• Four Contemporary American Indian Poets You May Not Know But Should (From the Best American Poetry Blog)
• Poetry for the President (from The Best American Poetry Blog)
• On Terrance Hayes
• The True Blood Rolling Stone: Revisiting the Naked Cover
• Mad Men: Season Two
• Mad Men and the Middle East
• How the Questions Surrounding Sonia Sotomayor Can Be Answered Via Literary Studies
• When Poetry Gets Political: Geoffery Hill and the Oxford Poetry Professorship
• On Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem
• Joe Biden and Plagiarism
• On Elizabeth Alexander as the Inaugural Poet
• On Season Five of The Wire
• Friday Night Lights: The New The Wire
• Can't Decide Who To Vote For? It's All About the Inaugural Poem
• Stuff White People Like: Redux
• Now That We Have Pop Music, Why Do We Still Need Poetry?
• Obama and the Whites
• Grading President Obama's Speech on Afghanistan
• Fox News Leaks Draft of Obama's "Welcome Back to School Speech"
• Reading Sarah Palin Swag