Patrick James Dunagan

Patrick James Dunagan was raised a skateboarder in Southern California and became interested in poetry as a transplanted teenager living in New Hampshire. He refined his reading skills at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire, where he earned his BA in literature and philosophy. Returning to California, he earned his joint MA/MFA at the now-defunct New College of California poetics program, where he studied with Tom Clark, Adam Cornford, Gloria Frym, Joanne Kyger, George Mattingly, and David Meltzer. He wrote his MA thesis on the work of poet Joel Oppenheimer.

In 2011 Post Apollo Press published his first full length book "There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk": A GUSTONBOOK. Das Gedichtete appeared from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2013. Previous publications include: The Young American Poets (2000), U.S.A. (2001), After the Sinews (2003), Fess Parker (2003), from Chansonniers (2008), Spirit Guest & Others (2008), Easy Eden w/ Micah Ballard (2009), and her friends down at the French cafe had no English words for me (2010). He assists his partner Iranian poet Ava Koohbor with translations from Farsi. He also edited and wrote the introduction for poet Owen Hill's A Walk Among the Bogus (2014).

In addition, he is author of The Duncan Era: One Poet’s Cosmology (2016), and he edited a portfolio honoring poet David Meltzer for Dispatches From The Poetry Wars, as well as Meltzer's previously unpublished 1965 poetic reportage Rock Tao (2022). With Nicholas James Whittington and Marina Lazzara, he edited Roots and Routes: Poetics at New College of California (2020), an anthology of critical writings by alumni and faculty of the now-defunct San Francisco-based program. His latest book of poems, After the Banished, was published by Empty Bowl Press in 2022. He regularly writes for Rain Taxi Review of Books.

Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at Gleeson Library at the University of San Francisco.