University of San Francisco Professor Dean Rader Awarded Prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for Poetry

SAN FRANCISCO (April 11, 2019) -- The University of San Francisco (USF) is proud to announce Professor Dean Rader as a recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Poetry category. Rader joins a distinguished and diverse group of 168 scholars, artists, and writers among 3,000 nominees in the U.S. and Canada. The honor is awarded annually to select individuals on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

Rader has been widely published in the fields of poetry, Indigenous American studies, and art/visual culture. At USF, he has been recognized with both the Dean’s Scholar Award and the Distinguished Research Award.

“Since the announcement, many people have asked how it feels to have won a Guggenheim. That is a complicated question,” stated Rader. “I grew up in a small farm town in Oklahoma, so being recognized by an institution like the Guggenheim is a bit surreal. It all seems so implausible. What I do feel, though, is deep gratitude — to my teachers, my students, my colleagues, my various presses, especially Copper Canyon, the writing and publishing community, my readers, my family, and in particular, USF which has been directly supportive with awards and grants but also indirectly supportive by committing to an ethical teaching load, small classes, and a mission that values a non-instrumentalist endeavor like poetry. I feel incredibly lucky.”

Awards for Rader’s prior work include the 2010 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize for his debut collection of poems, Works & Days, which also received the Writer’s League of Texas Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the Bush Memorial First Book Award. He is also a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Award. Three collections were published in 2017: Bullets Into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, edited with Brian Clements & Alexandra Teague, Suture, collaborative poems written with Simone Muench; and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for both the Northern California Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award. Most recently, he co-edited They Said: Contemporary Collaborative Writing and Native Voices: Indigenous American Poems, Craft, and Conversations.

Rader’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Best of the Net, Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Harvard Review and many others. He has written essays and reviews for dozens of publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and BOMB.

Since its founding in 1925, The Guggenheim Fellowship program remains a significant source of support for artists, writers, and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and scientific researchers, granting more than $360 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals. Awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, this year’s class of Fellows includes 49 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 75 different academic institutions, 28 states and the District of Columbia, and two Canadian provinces, with recipients ranging in age from 29 to 85.

Additional information can be found at the following links:
Biographical information on Professor Dean Rader
Information on the Fellows and their projects: www.gf.org

About the University of San Francisco

The University of San Francisco is located in the heart of one of the world’s most innovative and diverse cities and is home to a vibrant academic community of students and faculty who achieve excellence in their fields. Its diverse student body enjoys direct access to faculty, small classes, and outstanding opportunities in the city itself. USF is San Francisco’s first university, and its Jesuit Catholic mission helps ignite a student’s passion for social justice and a desire to “Change the World From Here.” For more information, visit USF Home Page.