Dan Rosenberg
Current City, State, Country
Biography
Dan Rosenberg is the author of Bassinet (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022), cadabra (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015), and The Crushing Organ (Dream Horse Press, 2012). He has also written two chapbooks, Thigh’s Hollow (Omnidawn, 2015) and A Thread of Hands (Tilt Press, 2010), and he co-translated Miklavž Komelj’s Hippodrome (Zephyr Press, 2016). His work has won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest.
Rosenberg holds a B.A. from Tufts University, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from The University of Georgia, where he was a Presidential Fellow. He is the chair of the English department at Wells College, where he teaches literature, creative writing, and translation theory. He also coordinates the Wells College Visiting Writers Series and edits the Wells College Press Chapbook Contest. Rosenberg lives in Ithaca, NY, with his wife, essayist and poet Alicia Rebecca Myers, and their son, Miles.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
I’ll casually refer to myself as a “bad Jew,” but I think my lack of interest in dogma, my suspicion of orthodoxies of all kinds, and my sense that language unfolds in endless possibilities are all rooted in the very Reform Jewish culture in which I was raised. I remember my father dressing up as Santa and handing out candy canes before he married the cantor of our temple. His holiday antics never struck me as odd because I understood all traditions as accessible to me insofar as they were pleasurable and kind. Which is part of my poetics, now. I also remember being stranded by a snowstorm with my brother’s new in-laws, and being invited by the father to attend his regular bible study, which consisted of him, two other Orthodox Jews, and their rabbi. We spent three hours discussing approximately two sentences from the Torah. The assumptions everyone else brought into that room were very different from my own, but the praxis was so familiar, so comfortable, so very much a part of my relationship to poetry: That language is most beautiful when it is load-bearing. That rich language invites questions, invites quarrels (with others and with ourselves, which Yeats identifies as a source of poetry). That the goal is not to know but to wonder.
Published Works
Poetry
Bassinet (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022)
cadabra (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015)
Thigh’s Hollow (chapbook; Omnidawn, 2015)
The Crushing Organ (Dream Horse Press, 2012)
A Thread of Hands (chapbook; Tilt Press, 2010)
Translation
Hippodrome, by Miklavž Komelj’s (Zephyr Press, 2016)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Current Title
Education
Tufts University: BA in English and Philosophy
The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, MFA in Poetry
The University of Georgia, Ph.D. in English