Dan Rosenberg
Associate Professor of English, Colorado Mesa University
Biography
Dan Rosenberg‘s books include Bassinet, cadabra, and The Crushing Organ, which won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize. He has also published several chapbooks, including Thigh’s Hollow, which won the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest. Rosenberg co-translated Slovenian poet Miklavž Komelj’s Hippodrome, and his translation of Komelj’s new and selected poems, Night Is More Abstract, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press in 2026. Rosenberg holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of Georgia, where he was a Presidential Fellow. He has taught at Iowa, Georgia, Augustana College, Wells College, and Cornell University. A former Tompkins County Poet Laureate, he is currently an associate professor of English at Colorado Mesa University. A co-host of the Yetzirah Reading Series, Rosenberg lives in Fruita, CO, with the poet Alicia Rebecca Myers, their son, and their medium-good dog.
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)
Links to Sample Works
- Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets: “Order”
- Ploughshares: “The Gnat and the Lion, January 2017”
- Conjunctions: “Field Guide”
