Bay Area poets Rolando André López, Denise Newman, Dean Rader, and Sarah Rosenthal read inventive new work that probes issues from the environmental crisis to the precarity of embodiment. This event celebrates three recently published books: Newman’s The Redesignation of Paradise (Kelsey Street Press), Rader’s Before the Borderless (Copper Canyon Press), and Rosenthal’s Estelle Meaning Star (Chax Press). Ranging in age from 30s to 60s, representing different poetry communities from spoken word to academic to performance, these poets share a drive for transforming the lyric to speak to our moment.
Denise Newman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, The Redesignation of Paradise (Kelsey Street Press, 2024), and, forthcoming, Reality Is Occurring in the Cracks in Reality in Bay Area Suite, a collection of four chapbooks with Elizabeth Robinson, Randy Prunty, George Albon (Selva Oscura/Three Count Pour, 2025). Her writings and translations have appeared in journals such as Chicago Review 75th Anniversary Anthology, Posit, World Literature Today, and Asymptote. For many years she has collaborated with composers providing lyrics for choral works and songs. Newman is also the translator of three novels by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen, and Naja Marie Aidt’s Baboon (winner of the PEN translation award) and When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back (long listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize). She teaches at the California College of the Arts. denisenewman.net
Dean Rader has authored or co-authored thirteen books. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His 2014 collection Landscape Portrait Figure Form was named by The Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book. Other titles include the poetry collection Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and the anthologies Native Voices: Contemporary Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations and Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Rader writes and reviews regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, BOMB, Ploughshares, Artforum, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, where he co-authors a poetry column with Victoria Chang. In 2020, he was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award. His most recent collection of poems, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, was named by Bookriot as one of ten “mesmerizing” books of modern poetry. Rader’s writing has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, the MacDowell Foundation, Art Omi, and The Headlands Center for the Arts. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry and a professor at the University of San Francisco.
Sarah Rosenthal is the author of the full-length collections Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, 2024), Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and two books in collaboration with Valerie Witte: One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life Through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer (Punctum, forthcoming 2025) and The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (The Operating System, 2019), as well as several chapbooks. She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her collaborative film We Agree on the Sun won Best Experimental Short at the Berlin Independent Film Festival. Her new collaborative film, Lizard Song, is currently on the film festival circuit. She has received the Leo Litwak Fiction Award, a Creative Capacity Innovation Grant, a San Francisco Education Fund Grant, and residencies at This Will Take Time, Hambidge, New York Mills, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, and Ragdale, as well as a two-year term as Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts. From 2012 to 2023, she served as a juror for the California Book Awards. More at sarahrosenthal.net.
Rolando André López, from San Juan, Puerto Rico, is an educator, writer, and translator. His work appears in Passages North, ORCA, and more, with citations in Best American Essays. A 2023 Puerto Rican Artist Fellow at MASSMOCA, he writes hybrid fiction, poetry, and essays. López lives in Oakland, California.