About

I engage with poetry in a number of ways—as a writer, critic, editor, and teacher. Since 2016, I’ve directed programs at Left Margin LIT, a creative writing center in Berkeley, where I also teach writing classes.

Prior to launching LML, I taught for nine years in UNC-Greensboro’s Creative Writing MFA Program. My scholarly interests include lyric poetry, the structure of verse, satire, literary criticism, nature writing, contemporary American poetry, and the intersection of poetry and technology. Occasionally I teach classes for the Arts@Google program.

David Roderick standing in front of a whiteboard looking at class and smiling

From 2017-2019 I wrote the “State Lines” poetry column for the San Francisco Chronicle. Since 2020 I’ve served as the Director of Content for The Adroit Journal. I’ve published interviews and criticism in many outlets, including Poets & Writers, LitHub, AGNI, West Branch, Poetry Northwest, and The Georgia Review. I recently joined the staff of Unbound Edition Press as an editor and consultant. My next book of poems is titled Darkness for Beginners. It will be published by Omnidawn Publishing in the spring of 2027.

Robert Pinsky selected Blue Colonial, my first collection, as the winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. In his introduction he wrote, “Here is a poet’s true evocation of time, of the fact that we are all destined to live in the puzzling, enticing tragi-comedy of our cultural and personal origins. David Roderick has imagined that destiny in a memorable new way.”

My second book, The Americans, was awarded the Julie Suk Prize. Ross Gay said of the book, “It’s sort of remarkable the way David Roderick makes such gorgeous music of the deep and abiding loneliness of which our lives—and our nations and dreams—sometimes, often, are made. It’s the music, the beauty, after all, that’s balm to all this sorrow.”

My writing has earned an NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, Shenandoah’s James Boatwright III Prize, and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize from NYU, selected by Phillis Levin, Vijay Seshadri, and Elizabeth Spires.

I live in Berkeley with my wife, poet Rachel Richardson, and our two daughters. I also serve as the commissioner of Old Man Basketball, a basketball collective in Berkeley’s Thousand Oaks neighborhood.