Dean Rader

Dean Rader is the author of Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, a visual and textual collection pairing Rader’s poems and Twombly’s art (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). Rader’s work engages themes of identity and sustainability with attention to formal and global shifts. In her review for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Elena Karina Byrne describes the book as “stunning,” noting that “Rader’s responses to Twombly’s elegiac body of work are as physical and emotionally ignited as they are intellectually apprehended.”

Rader’s debut collection, Works & Days (Truman State University Press, 2010), won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and his book Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn, 2014) was highlighted as a standout poetry book of the year in the Barnes & Noble Review. His work was also featured in the Best American Poetry 2012 anthology. In 2015, he was commissioned by The San Francisco Chronicle to write a poem commemorating the Golden State Warriors’ run to the NBA Championship. Three days after the 2016 presidential election, his poem “America I Do Not Call Your Name without Hope” also ran in the San Francisco Chronicle and went viral. Rader’s work has been supported by fellowships from Princeton, Harvard, Art Omi, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and MacDowell.

A prolific critic, Rader was a finalist for the 2020 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. He has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, Ploughshares, BOMB, The Kenyon Review, and The Huffington Post. Rader and Victoria Chang coauthored “Two Roads,” a poetry review column for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Rader was raised in Weatherford, Oklahoma. He earned a BA at Baylor University, as well as an MA and a PhD in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco, and he lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.