Patrick Rosal

Patrick Rosal is the author of The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems, listed among The Boston Globe’s best books of the year and named winner of the William Carlos Williams Book Award. His 2016 collection Brooklyn Antediluvian won the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize. With interests that span several disciplines, he has conducted interviews about water with people from around the globe, coordinated community arts gatherings, and led numerous experimental collaborations.

As a self-taught musician, he has composed art song for traditional and non-traditional instrumentation. He has made hundreds of appearances in Europe, Africa, Asia, and throughout the Americas at venues that include Lincoln Center, NJPAC, the Cabrillo housing projects for agricultural workers, and historic Filipino Community Hall in Delano, comprising a three-decade career as writer and performer.

He penned the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Jessica Hagedorn’s seminal novel Dogeaters. Additional writing has been published in the New York Times, The Nation, USA Today, e-flux, and Best American Poetry among a host of other journals and magazines.

He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Research Scholar program, NJSCA, and the Civitella Ranieri Residency. He serves as the inaugural Campus Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden. He has also served as Interim Director of the MFA Program and is a Distinguished Professor of English.

His mother and father were immigrants from the Philippines who met in the U.S. while his father was still a Catholic priest and theologian in the Thomist tradition.