David Roderick

David Roderick grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts. At Colby College, where he earned his BA, he studied American Studies and creative writing. He earned an MFA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and also studied poetry at Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner fellow.

Roderick’s first book, Blue Colonial (2006), was chosen by Robert Pinsky as winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. Set in Plymouth, the book uses dramatic and narrative effects to explore the burdens of historical inheritance: vanished Native American tribes, the seeds of American culture, and our physical and psychological encroachment upon the natural landscape.

The Pitt Poetry Series published Roderick’s second book, The Americans, in 2014. Poet and critic David Rivard writes of The Americans: “Like Robert Frank in his great photo essay of the same name, Roderick has some news for us: not only do we not know where we’ve come from, we don’t know where we are. With care and a restorative watchfulness, he has made terrific poetry out of our drifting in the fog.”

Roderick’s poetry has also been honored with the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. He teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.