Poet, essayist, musician, and interdisciplinary artist Patrick Rosal was raised in New Jersey by Filipino immigrant parents. His father was a self-taught musician, and Rosal, also self-taught, found a home in music as a performer, DJ, and break-dancer before venturing into writing. He earned his BA at Bloomfield College and his MFA in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
Rosal is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems (Persea, 2021), winner of the William Carlos Williams Book Award. His previous books include Brooklyn Antediluvian (2016), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Boneshepherds (2011), which was named a small press highlight by the National Book Critics Circle and a notable book by the Academy of American Poets; My American Kundiman (2006), winner of the Global Filipino Literary Award and a Poetry/Prose Award from the Association for Asian American Studies; and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003). His debut chapbook, Uncommon Denominators (2002), won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award.
In 2021, Rosal worked with Cherita Harrell, Jacob Camacho, and his wife, Mary Rose Go, as Quili Quili Power Projects to release copies of Atang, a “self-published book object and experimental, traveling altar.” With Karissa Chen and Ross Gay, he is a co-founding editor of Some Call It Ballin’, a literary sports magazine. As a musician, he recently completed an arrangement of Lucille Clifton’s poem “sorrows” for voice and piano, and he provides arrangement and accompaniment for Go, a soprano. He is at work on a sequence of short art songs, the first of which premiered at Rutgers University in 2023.
Rosal has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Research Scholar program, and the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, as well as residencies from Civitella Ranieri, Lannan, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. His poems and essays have been published in many journals and anthologies, including the New York Times, Tin House, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Grantland, BreakBeat Poets, and The Best American Poetry.
Rosal has taught at colleges and universities including Princeton, the University of Texas, Austin, Sarah Lawrence College, and Bloomfield College. He has also taught high school workshops at several institutions and conducted workshops in Alabama prisons through Auburn University. Currently, he serves as Distinguished Professor of English and inaugural Campus Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University–Camden, where he coordinates Occasions for Gathering and Quilting Water, a five-year public art project collecting interviews about water from around the world. He lives in Rahway, New Jersey.
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More Patrick Rosal
Text: Willie Perdomo interviews Rosal at The Common
Text: Read poets by Rosal at the Academy of American Poets
Video: Rosal performs "Sundiata Elegy" for the Poetry Society of America
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Photo by Williams Cole.