Poets Dean Rader and Dana Levin Read from New Collections

Poets Dean Rader (Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry) and Dana Levin (Banana Palace) present their new collections from Copper Canyon Press. Wine and sparkling water will be served.

About Dean Rader’s Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry:

In Dean Rader’s newest work, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, the narrator considers the self and society as a Wikipedia page—forever unfinished, sculpted, and transformed by the ever-present push and pull of politics, culture, and American’s fluctuating national identity. Rader’s innovative voice is full of humor and inquiry, inviting readers to fully participate in the creation.

Praise for Dean Rader:

“…few poets capture the contradictions of our national life with as much sensitivity or keenness.” —Publishers Weekly

Dean Rader’s collections include Works & Days (2010) and Landscape Portrait Figure Form, (Omnidawn, 2014). Rader’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, American Poetry Review, and Best American Poetry. He is the editor of the 2014 anthology 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poems (99: The Press).  Rader writes about literature, culture and politics regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle and The Huffington Post. He is professor of English at the University of San Francisco.

About Dana Levin’s Banana Palace:

In her fourth collection, Banana Palace, Dana Levin confronts the deep anxieties of our age with bemusement, incredulity, outrage, and hope. Observing the crisis of human appetite through the lenses of psychology and science fiction, she’s disquieted at a world “ruled by a bipolar father-god, unconscious, suicidal.”

Praise for Banana Palace:

“Images that are satisfyingly clear…and excitingly inexplicable.” —Robert Pinsky, Washington Post

 “The world may seem broken, but these poems don’t convey doom—Levin’s clear, grounded language leaves the reader hopeful in the end.” —Publishers Weekly

Dana Levin’s previous collections include In the Surgical Theatre and Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Recent poetry and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry 2015, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, and Poetry. She serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.