David Roderick’s first book, Blue Colonial, won the APR/Honickman Prize and was published jointly by the American Poetry Review and Copper Canyon Press in 2006.
The book led to fellowships at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. Following the book’s publication, David was named the recipient of the 2007-2008 Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship.
The Americans, David’s second collection, was published as part of the Pitt Poetry Series in 2014. Shenandoah awarded David its annual James Boatwright III Prize for a sequence of poems from the book. A larger sample of poems won the 2012 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, selected by Phillis Levin, Vijay Seshadri, and Elizabeth Spires. Natasha Trethewey says of The Americans, “The poet asks: Must nostalgia/walk like a prince through all our rooms? This lovely collection shows us a way to confront that question within ourselves.”
Since completing his M.F.A. in poetry at the University of Massachusetts and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, David has taught creative writing and literature classes at Stanford, the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is currently the Program Director of Left Margin Lit, a literary startup in the Bay Area.
David’s alter-ego hosts The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show. He lives in Berkeley with his wife, the poet Rachel Richardson, and their two daughters.