Join us for an evening of poetry with San Francisco Bay Area poets and translators Judy Halebsky, Amanda Moore. and Dean Rader, presented in conjunction with ALTA49.
Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections—Sky=Empty, Tree Line, and Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged)—and the chapbook Space/ Gap/ Interval/ Distance. Born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she holds an M.F.A. in English & Creative Writing from Mills College and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Davis. On fellowships from the Japanese Ministry of Culture, she spent five years living in Japan, where she trained in Butoh dance and Noh theatre. She now directs the low-residency MFA program at Dominican University of California.
Halebsky's work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Millay Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. Sky=Empty won the New Issues Poetry Prize, and Space/ Gap/ Interval/ Distance won the Poets-Under-Forty Award from Sixteen Rivers Press. Tree Line was shortlisted for five awards including the Believer Poetry Award and the California Book Award. In Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged), published in 2020 by University of Arkansas Press, the Tang Dynasty poets Li Bai and Du Fu encounter everyday life in Oakland, California, where Halebsky now lives with her nature guide and their young daughter.
Amanda Moore's debut collection of poetry, Requeening, was selected for the 2020 National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong and published by HarperCollins/Ecco in October 2021. It was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and featured in Oprah Magazine's annual Favorite Things Issue. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Best New Poets, ZZYZVA, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting; her essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, The Baltimore Review, and Catapult; and her translations of Costa Rican poet Ana Istarú have been published or are forthcoming in Lunch Ticket and Poet Lore.
Poetry editor at Bull City Press's INCH and co-organizer of the Poetry World Series, Amanda is a teacher, workshop leader, and woodworker who lives by the beach in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco.
Dean Rader is a poet, art writer, scholar, and critic who has published widely in the fields of poetry, American Indigenous studies, modern and contemporary art, and visual culture. He has authored or co-authored thirteen books. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the Bob Bush Memorial Award for a First Book of poems, and won the 2010 Writer's League of Texas Poetry Prize. His follow-up book, Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn), was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the Best Poetry Books of 2013. Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press) was published in 2017 and was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award.
In 2017, along with Brian Clements and Alexandra Teague, he co-edited Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon Press), and he co-authored a book of collaborative sonnets with the poet Simone Muench, entitled Suture (Black Lawrence Press).
His scholarly book Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI (University of Texas Press, 2010) won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Studies. Along with Janice Gould, he edited Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (University of Arizona Press) and most recently, with CMarie Fuhrman co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Native Voices: Contemporary Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations (Tupelo Press).
Rader writes and reviews for Artforum, The Huffington Post, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Ploughshares, The San Francisco Chronicle, and BOMB. In 2021, he and Victoria Chang began a collaborative poetry review feature for The Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2021, he was a finalist for the Nona Balakaian Award from the National Book Critics Circle. On January 1, 2021, he launched the popular video series, Poems That Changed Me. During the previous Trump administration, he wrote about teaching poetry post-truth and post-Trump and was interviewed by The Washington Post on the convergence of poetry and politics.
Rader is a professor at the University of San Francisco, where he teaches in The Department of English, the MFA Program in Creative Writing, and the Honors College. He is a two-time recipient of the University's Distinguished Research Award and the College of Arts & Sciences' Dean's Scholar Award, as well as a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Society of Collegiate Scholars. Most recently, he collaborated with the calligrapher Thomas Ingmire on a series of art books that blend the visual and the textual. His newest book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, a collection of poems in which Rader's poems and Twombly's work appear side-by-side, was published in April 2023 by Copper Canyon Press and named by Book Riot as one of ten "mesmerizing" books of modern poetry. Rader and his book are featured in the new documentary Un/veiled. Inside the Creative Process (After Cy Twombly) produced by the Cy Twombly Foundation.
His writing has been supported by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, Princeton University, and Harvard University. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.