Dean Rader

Dean Rader is an American writer and professor who teaches at the University of San Francisco, in the Department of English, where he has also served as Department Chair. Rader holds a M.A. & Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton where he studied translation, poetry, visual culture, and literary studies. He is primarily known for his poems that mix high and low art and his scholarly work on Native American poetry.

His "Self Portrait as Wikipedia Entry" was posted on ZYZZYVA on February 6, 2012.

Literary work

In addition to his teaching, Rader is a prolific reviewer, a scholar of film and art, and an award winning poet. His poem "Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934" won the Sow's Ear Review poetry prize in 2009, judged by Kelly Cherry. Rader's debut poetry collection, Works and Days, won the 2010 Truman State University T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, judged by Claudia Keelan. Works & Days was also named a finalist for the Bob Bush Memorial First Book Award, and it won the Writer's League of Texas Book Award for Poetry.

Rader's most recent collection, Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn 2014) a book that explores the connection between poetry and painting, was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the year's Best Books of Poems. He was also the recipient of the George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Harvard poet and critic Stephen Burt selected a folio of Rader's poems entitled "American Self-Portrait" for the 2015 award.

In 2011, Rader wrote a series of columns for The San Francisco Chronicle on The 10 Greatest Poets, which received media coverage in The New York Times.

That same year, Rader began a blog called 99 Poems for the 99 Percent which posted 99 poems over 99 days. The blog featured poems by well-known writers like LeAnne Howe, Matthew Zapruder, Robert Pinsky, Martha Collins, Heid Erdrich, Edward Hirsch, Timothy Donnelly, Maxine Chernoff, Camille T. Dungy, and Bob Hicok as well as beginning and non-professional poets. In 2014, 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry, was published in book form. In August, it debuted at #2 on the Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller List and in September, it took over the #1 spot.

Other awards and fellowships

• Fellowships at Harvard University and Princeton University
• Poetry prizes from Crab Orchard Review and Common Ground Review, 2007
• National Endowment for the Humanities Chair at the University of San Francisco, 2009–2010.
• Editor, Studies in American Indian Literature

Works

Online publications

• The Weekly Rader, blog
• 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, blog

External links

• Dean Rader's website
• Dean Rader, University of San Francisco page
• Matthew Zapruder and Rader in conversation, Huffington Post
• Review of Works & Days in Poetry Flash
• Stuff White People Like: A Blog Review