The Role of Poetry in Contemporary America: Dean Rader and Steph Burt in Conversation

Cambridge Public Library
Community Room (basement)
449 Broadway, Cambridge, MA

Dean Rader is a professor of English at the University of San Francisco. His newest collection, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, was published in January 2017 by Copper Canyon Press. Works & Days, his debut collection, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize and the Writer’s League of Texas Book Award. Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn, 2014) was named one of the best books of poetry of the year by the Barnes & Noble review. He writes frequently about literature, culture, and politics for The San Francisco Chronicle and The Huffington Post.

Stephen Burt (who also goes by Steph and Stephanie) is Professor of English at Harvard and the author of several previous books of poetry and literary criticism, among them Belmont and Close Calls with Nonsense, both from Graywolf Press, as well as The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Harvard University Press). Her new collection, Advice from the Lights (Graywolf Press), goes on sale October 3.