David Roderick

This article is about the poet. For the politician, see David Roderick (Washington State politician).

David Roderick (born 1970) is an American poet from Plymouth, Massachusetts, who taught for nine years at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Previously, he had lectured at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of San Francisco, and at Stanford University, where he also conducted classes for its Education Program for Gifted Youth summer program.

Roderick in 2025

In 2016, with Rachel Richardson, he founded Left Margin LIT, a creative writing center in Berkeley, California, that offers readings by and classes for poets and writers of creative prose, both fiction and nonfiction.^[1]

His work has appeared in 32 Poems, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Ontario Review, Poetry Northwest, River Styx, Verse, The Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, The Missouri Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Education

• B.A. – Colby College
• MFA, MFA Program for Poets & Writers – The University of Massachusetts Amherst.
• Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Stanford University.

Awards

• 2021-2022 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship
• 2014 Julie Suk Award for The Americans.
• 2007-2008 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship
• 2006 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize^[2]
• 2003 Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellowship of the American Antiquarian Society
• 2002-2004 Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry
• Scholarship – Bread Loaf Writers' Conference

Personal life

Roderick lives in Berkeley, California, with the poet Rachel Richardson and their two children.^[3] He directs Left Margin LIT, a creative writing center serving writers in the Bay Area.

Books

• Blue Colonial (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)
• The Americans (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014)