Poetry is an interesting medium for commenting on the world at large, including the world of politics.
Poet Dean Rader's debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize and Landscape Portrait Figure Form (2014) was named by The Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book of the year. He was won numerous awards for his writing, including the 2016 Common Good Books Prize, judged by Garrison Keillor, and the 2015 George Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America, judged by Stephen Burt.
He has written or co-edited three scholarly books and was the editor of the 2014 anthology 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry, which hit #1 on the Small Press Distribution Bestseller list. He writes and reviews regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and The Huffington Post.
Two new collections of poetry appeared in 2017, including a book of collaborative sonnets written with Simone Muench, titled Suture (Black Lawrence Press) and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon). In their review of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, Publisher’s Weekly writes “few poets capture the contradictions of our national life with as much sensitivity or keenness.”
