Dean Rader

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored thirteen books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes & Noble Review Best Book, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, was published in April of 2023 and was named by Book Riot as one of ten “mesmerizing” books of modern poetry.  His work has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, and the MacDowell Foundation. Rader is a recipient of a 2016 Distinguished Teaching Award and is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. 

Dean wishes he could have met Cy Twombly, Marvin Gaye, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Emily Dickinson. 

Professor Rader enjoys teaching a diversity of classes ranging from poetry workshops and special topics classes for English majors; seminars on the Modern Period, Global Poetry and the American Experience for the Honors College; Poetry Studio and Poetry and the City for the general undergraduate population and directing master's theses for the MFA program in creative writing.

• Poetry
• American Indian studies
• Art & visual culture

• Poetry
• Visual culture
• Indigenous American studies

• State University of New York - Binghamton, PhD in Comparative Literature, 1995

• Advisory Board, Center for Research, Artistic, and Scholarly Excellence (CRASE) (2017-2021)
• Chair, Strategic Enrollment Management Advisory Board (2019-2020)
• Interim Director, St. Ignatius Institute (2017-2018)
• Chair, Department of English (2012-2014; 2016-2017)
• Associate Dean for Arts & Humanities (2004-2007)

• Finalist, Nina Balakian Award, National Book Critics Circle (2021)
• Barbara and Andrew Senchak Fellowship in Poetry, MacDowell Foundation (2020)
• Distinguished Research Award, USF (2020)
• Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry (2019)
• Distinguished Teaching Award, Society of Collegiate Scholars (2016)

• Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly (poems). Copper Canyon Press. (2023)
• Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. Eds, CMarie Fuhrman & Dean Rader. Tupelo Press. (2019)
• Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Eds. Brian Clements, Alexandra Teague, and Dean Rader. Beacon Press. (2017)
• Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry. (poems) Copper Canyon Press. (2017)
• Engaged Resistance: Contemporary American Indian Art, Literature and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI. University of Texas Press. 2011. Winner, Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Scholarship