Dean Rader is professor of English at the University of San Francisco where he held the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair. He has published widely in the fields of poetry, literary studies, American Indian studies, and visual and popular culture. He has received the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize (2007) and The Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize (2009). He regularly contributes op-eds and book reviews to San Francisco Chronicle and blogs at The Weekly Rader, SemiObama and 52 Gavins. A native of Weatherford, Oklahoma, he now lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

Other poems by Dean Rader in Verse Daily:

Books by Dean Rader:

Other poems on the web by Dean Rader:
"Traveling to Oklahoma for My Grandmother's Funeral, I Write a Poem About Wallace Stevens"
Four poems

Dean Rader's Blog.

Dean Rader's Website.

Dean Rader According to Wikipedia.

About Works & Days:

"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."
—Claudia Keelan

"Dean Rader reads his past, reads the landscape of his native land, especially Oklahoma, through the lens of previous poets, such as Hesiod, his first tutelary guide, who lead him to a vibrant, innovative, and fresh new poetry, who point the way to his own formal making, his poignant American version of life and labor, Works & Days."
—Edward Hirsch

"'Don’t just sing; split us open' is the two-headed imperative in Rader’s meticulously crafted, dazzling book that elates while it simultaneously interrogates and shivs us. Caroming between labor, lineage, salutation and self-examination, Works & Days invites us to watch TV on Sunday with Hesiod as host; God, Toad, Frog as the guests who won’t leave; and O’Hara, Stevens, Neruda and Motherwell as visitors dropping by for a beer and Sudoku. Although Rader’s poems vibrate with high-voltage wit, they are equally occupied with 'trespass, skin-spark, and elegy' as they lock themselves under the tongue so we may always know their necessary and sustaining song."
—Simone Muench

"'There is no anticipation like waiting for the poem you ordered to arrive,' Dean Rader writes. Well, the poems we ordered have arrived. Works & Days is a shipment of poetic pleasure, a care package to get readers through a dark, unpoetical time. Playful, probing, frequently philosophical (and sometimes mock-philosophical, and sometimes both), these entertaining and liberating poems know their tradition and engage with it without being confined by it."
—Troy Jollimore

"Dean Rader’s engaging alter-egos take the sting out of the divided self. The reader is constantly—pleasurably—at risk, compelled to think about/laugh at the human condition, as is the woman next to the narrator in seat 7D, 'Because / the next line is this: / She will die before I do. . .' (this, in the collection’s opening poem!). But we are in such good hands – and the best party is always in the lifeboat."
—Patty Seyburn