Patrick Rosal

Patrick Rosal is the author of five full-length poetry collections including The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He currently serves as inaugural Campus Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-Camden, where he coordinates the programming series Occasions for Gathering and Quilting Water, a five-year public art project collecting interviews about water from around the world. He is also Distinguished Professor of English teaching courses on poetry, performance, improvisation, collaboration, and community art. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Research Scholar program. and the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. Residencies include Civitella Ranieri, a Lannan Residency in Marfa, TX, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He is co-founding editor of Some Call It Ballin’, a literary sports magazine.

Brooklyn Antediluvian (2016), won the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize for best book of poetry and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry. Previously, Boneshepherds (2011) was named a small press highlight by the National Book Critics Circle and a notable book by the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of My American Kundiman (2006), and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003). His collections have also been honored with the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, Global Filipino Literary Award and the Asian American Writers Workshop Members' Choice Award.

He wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Jessica Hagedorn’s seminal novel, Dogeaters and is currently writing the introduction to a contemporary edition of Azucena by M. de Gracia Concepcion, which is the first collection of poetry in English by a Filipino writer; the re-release of the book marks the centennial of Concepcion’s significant achievement in Asian American writing. Rosal has also served as consultant to the 2021 USA Today’s “Never Been Told” feature on the canonical Asian American writer and activist Carlos Bulosan. With Cherita Harrell, Jacob Camacho, and his wife Mary Rose Go, he released copies of Atang, an experimental, traveling altar and self-published book object under the ad hoc moniker of Quili Quili Power Projects. Atang was distributed in 2021 on the quincentenary of the defeat of Magellan by Lapu Lapu in 1521. Quili Quili Power is a conceptual extension of the (also ad hoc, mostly invisible) Institite for the Study for Contemporary Collaborative Imagining (aka ICCII), which was launched in 2017 with the Microscope Fellowship, which distributed free 7x microscopes around America.

A self-taught musician and composer, he grew up around many musical influences (including his father, who was also a self-taught pianist/organist and composer/arranger). He is currently building a sequence of short art songs, the first which—”Across—Écho Monde” for soprano and cello—was premiered at Rutgers University in 2023. He has recently completed a setting of the Lucille Clifton poem “sorrows” for voice and piano. He has provided recorded arrangement and live accompaniment for his wife, Mary Rose Go (soprano). He is well-versed in hip hop production techniques as well as analog and digital synthesis. He is a student of Afro-Cuban percussion, sacred music, improvised/creative modes, and many folkloric traditions from the Philippines, the Pacific, South America and the Caribbean.

He has received teaching appointments at Princeton University, Penn State Altoona, Centre College, the University of Texas, Austin, Drew University's Low-Residency MFA program and Sarah Lawrence College. He taught creative writing for several years at Bloomfield College where he previously earned his B.A. and twice has served on the faculty of Kundiman’s Summer Retreat for Asian American Poets. In addition to conducting workshops in Alabama prisons through Auburn University, he has taught high school workshops through the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Sarah Lawrence College's Summer Writing Conference for High School Students, Urban Word NYC, and the Volume workshops in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including The New York Times, Tin House, Drunken Boat, Poetry, New England Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Grantland, Brevity, Breakbeat Poets, and The Best American Poetry. His work has been recognized by the annual Allen Ginsberg Awards, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Arts and Letters Prize, Best of the Net among others. His chapbook Uncommon Denominators won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina, Aiken.

His poems and voiceovers were included in the Argentine feature-length film Anhua: Amanecer which screened at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival. He has also appeared on the Leonard Lopate Show and the BBC Radio's World Today.

His invited readings and performances include an opening set for KRS-ONE at NJPAC, several appearances at the Dodge Poetry Festival, the Stadler Center for Poetry, WordFest in Asheville, the poetry reading series at Georgia Tech, Poetry @ MIT, the Carr Reading Series at the University of Illinois, the Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center, Sarah Lawrence College, where he earned his MFA, and hundreds of other venues that span the United States, London, Buenos Aires, South Africa, Senegal, Italy, Spain, Greece, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. 

Publications:

• Binyag sa Taglamig (Christened in Winter), Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2023

• The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems, Persea Books

• Brooklyn Antediluvian, Persea Books

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• Holley Lecture, Bloomfield College

• National Book Festival

• New Labor Forum 25th Anniversary, CUNY

Previous Organizations: 

• Princeton University

• University of Texas, Austin

• Sarah Lawrence College

Accomplishments:

• Guggenheim Fellow

• National Endowment for the Arts Fellow

• Lenore Marshall Prize Winner

Upcoming Projects:

• Quilting Water

• Elegy for the Dance Floor

• Art Song setting of Lucille Clifton's poem "Sorrows"

A Directors' Signature Research Project: Institute Director Patrick Rosal, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University–Camden

Quilting Water is an international public art initiative that gathers interviews about water primarily from racialized communities from the U.S. and around the world. The interview is built upon five simple questions about an individual’s memories, observations, and dreams/wishes around water—simply, our past, present, and future. We’re honored to work with local Camden Black artists, and others, who will construct quilts inspired by the Quilting Water archive and serve as guides throughout the project. We hope the archive and quilts will allow us to see relationships between disparate communities and their stories through water.

Quilting Water has gathered interviews about water from South Africa, Senegal, Cabo Verde, Japan, Puerto Rico, Belgium, the Philippines, the Atayal people of Taiwan, as well as right here in New Jersey. The content of these water stories are made available to local Black artists who craft quilts in dialogue with this global archive. 

https://globalracialjustice.rutgers.edu/what-we-do/directors-signature-research-projects/quilting-water

This program is part of a collaboration between the Institute and the Writers House at Rutgers University, Camden. This partnership seeks to work with artists to imagine new formats for the presentation of challenging, interdisciplinary literary work that engages questions of racial reckoning.

The most recent workshop can be viewed here. 

Occasions for Gathering is happy to present a series of events celebrating So We Can Know, a literary anthology addressing a range of reproductive experiences—from pregnancy and childbirth to abortion and loss. We are inviting women and birthing people to three spring writing workshops. Open to writers and non-writers alike these sessions are led by So We Can Know contributors.

With these gatherings, we hope to spark deep listening, narrative power, and the empathy necessary for a more just future.

https://globalracialjustice.rutgers.edu/news/so-we-can-know-article-spring-2023