a b o u t

Dean Rader is a writer and professor who works widely in the fields of media, political, and literary studies.  In addition to two books, he has published dozens of essays, articles, book chapters, translations, op-eds, and poems in both national and international publications.

His first book of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, judged by Claudia Keelan. It is forthcoming in 2010 from Truman State University Press.  Poems from the collection have appeared in Quarterly West, POOL, Colorado Review, Poet Lore and many others.  One of his Frog and Toad poems won the 2008 Crab Creek Review poetry prize, and the signature poem from the collection, "Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934," won the 2009 Sow's Ear Review Poetry Prize, judged by Kely Cherry.  

Of Works & Days, Claudia Keelan writes "On the road with epistemology and a company of poets and philosophers, Frog has his work cut out for him. Beginning with a funeral and ending with day's end, the poems in this ambitious collection seek—not conciliation, not reconciliation—but what you could call real locale in terms of the poetic tradition. Playing with the conventions that—depending upon your aesthetics—either free or bind us, Works & Days asks timely questions, never forgetting that Self too, is a fundamental part of the landscape. This is a serious book that never takes itself too seriously. It could be a primer for MFA programs everywhere."

Rader is also the author of Engaged Resistance: Contemporary American Indian Art, Literature, and Film, forthcoming in 2011 from the University of Texas Press.  The first scholarly study to consider Native American cultural expression across three genres, Engaged Resistance demonstrates the ways in which Native writers, filmmakers, and artiss participate in what Rader calls "aesthetic activism."  Focusing on artists Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Edgar Heap of Birds, Allan Houser; writers Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, LeAnne Howe; and filmmakers Chris Eyre, Valerie Red Horse, and Alexie, Engaged Resistance argues that Native creative arts help articulate and advance Indian soverignty.

 Lastly, he is in the beginning stages of a long-term book project that explores the intersection of contemporary American art, politics and culture, for which his blog (http://weeklyrader.blogspot.com) will serve as a kind of testing ground.

Rader is an Associate Professor of English and former Associate Dean at the University of San Francisco.  He teaches a wide variety of classes, all of which explore the ways in which media, artistic, and literary texts influence and are influenced by larger cultural forces.  He also teaches a class on the ethics of langauge in which his students look at the ways common and uncommon uses of langauge enter the political sphere.