OVERVIEW

Rodger Kamenetz is an award-winning poet and author. He wrote the landmark international bestseller The Jew in the Lotus and the National Jewish Book Award-winning Stalking Elijah. His five books of poetry include The Lowercase Jew --he has been called “the most formidable of the Jewish-American poets”. His memoir, Terra Infirma, has been described as “the most beautiful book ever written about a mother and son.”

            His latest book, The History of Last Night's Dream, was featured on Oprah Winfrey's Soul Series. Kamenetz takes us on an historical tour of dreaming from Genesis to now, and shows how dreams have been misinterpreted. He then shows how dreams can be used today to reveal the truth of the soul.

for lectures, contact  lectures@kamenetz.com

ACADEMIC CAREER

Rodger Kamenetz is the Erich and Lea Sternberg Honors Professor at Louisiana State University and is also the recipient of the LSU Distinguished Faculty Award for 2008. He has a dual appointment as a Professor in the Department of English and in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He is the founding director of LSU's highly successful MFA program in Creative Writing, and the founding director of the Jewish Studies Program. His students have gone on to successful writing careers, among them poets Martha Serpas, Virgil Suarez, Mark Yakich and Anthony Kelman and fiction writers Olympia Vernon, Ronlyn Domingue, Laurie Lynn Drummond,and Connie Porter. He holds a B.A. from Yale College and graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins and Stanford Universities.

NON-FICTION

Rodger Kamenetz is a pioneer in literary nonfiction. His memoir Terra Infirma appeared first in 1985. Walker Percy called Terra Infirma "a haunting memoir, deeply felt, poignant, tragic-- funny-- powerful, and memorable for the poetic precision of its language." The New York Times found it "impressively intelligent, maturely perceptive... a strange and moving book." Philip Lopate commented: "Entirely under the spell of deep feeling, yet never relinquishing the irony of complex intelligence, this is one of the most beautiful books ever written about a mother and a son." The book was reprinted by Schocken Books in 1999 and is widely considered a classic mother-son memoir. In 1994 Kamenetz's career in nonfiction took a major turn with the publication of The Jew in the Lotus. This landmark international best-seller has been reprinted 33 times, most recently in an updated 2007 edition which includes an afterword by the author. It is widely used as a textbook. The Jew in the Lotus also inspired a PBS film documentary of the same title, which first aired in 1999. The book became a model for writing about the spiritual journey with humor and a sense of adventure. As BOOKLIST noted "Kamenetz defines and comments upon complex matters with skill, personableness, and a welcome dash of levity." The Jew in the Lotus has been named one of the most important books about Judaism of the past thirty years, and is widely cited in histories of religion. His follow-up, Stalking Elijah (Harper One, 1997) received the National Jewish Book AWard for Jewish Thought. His most recent nonfiction book,The History of Last Night's Dream was called by various reviewers: "smart" "funny", "affable" audacious" "fascinating" "beautifully written" "poetic", and "revolutionary". Kamenetz is currently working on a nonfiction book project for the Jewish Encounters Series sponsored by the Nextbook Foundation. He has received grants for his nonfiction writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Arts Council, the Koret Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. His essays have appeared in Grand Street, Missouri Review, Southern Review, Exquisite Corpse and The New York Times Magazine.

POETRY

Rodger Kamenetz is the author of five books of poetry. The latest is The Lowercase Jew published by Northwestern University Press. His poems have appeared in 25 major anthologies as well as in leading periodicals including The New Republic, Tikkun, Image, Callaloo, Grand Street, Shenandoah, Exquisite Corpse, Boulevard, Pequod,Southern Review,Western Humanities Review, North American Review. He received the Readers' Choice Award in poetry from Prairie Schooner and the St. Andrews Review award in poetry. Several reviewers have commented on the grace of Kamenetz's language, of which Andrei Codrescu wrote in the San Francisco Review of Books, "his ear is as good as William Carlos Williams in the early poetry" and Yehudah Amichai that "his poems are a secret and almost intimate meeting place of English and Hebrew." Louise Erdrich adds that "Kamenetz's poems whirl and shake on the page." Another strong appeal has been his evocation of Jewish diaspora life, and Jewish religion. Writing in the Forward, Joel Lewis declared Kamenetz a "modern day Rashi" and The Missing Jew, "The ideal Baedeker for the American Jewish Diaspora." The Jerusalem Post called his recent work "stunningly powerful", and called Kamenetz "a master at infusing seemingly plain words with resonance and depth, with subtle textures and playful ironies,wonderfully open to a whole gamut of human emotions." His readings are dynamic and entertaining: he has read his poetry at the Prague Summer Program,the Deep South Writers conference, The Tennesee Williams Festival, the Words and Music Festival, the Spoleto Festival, South Central MLA, the University of Missouri Visiting Writers Program, and at Yale, Harvard, NYU, and dozens of other campuses, as well as on PBS and NPR.

DREAM THERAPIST

Rodger Kamenetz works as a certified dream therapist. In weekly hour-long sessions, dreams are used to lead clients on a journey of great psychological and spiritual depth. Rodger has been working with clients since 2003 under the direct training of Marc Bregman, the master teacher at North of Eden. If you are interested in working with Rodger, or learning more about the process, you may contact him at   dream@kamenetz.com

LECTURES AND READINGS

Rodger has given lectures, talks, led text study, and conducted weekend retreats and shabbatons all over North America and Europe.

He has spoken at Yale, Harvard and Stanford and many other universities and colleges; at Jewish, Buddhist, Unitarian and Catholic institutions; at the 92nd Street Y, the Rabbinical Assembly, the National Hillel Conference, the National Board of Trustees for the Union of Reform Judaism; at the Prague Summer Seminars, the Chrysostom Society, and the Glen Workshops.

He gives formal lectures, informal talks, seminars, poetry readings, and leads text study.

A list of his current topics follows.

• “What  I Learned About Judaism From the Dalai Lama”
• “Buddhist Questions and Jewish Answers”
• “The Struggle between the Image and the Word: Religions of the Word in a time of Images”
• “The Uninterpretation of Dreams: How to Work With Dreams”
• “The Three Gifts of the Dream in Genesis”
• “The Case of the Disappearing Dream: The Rabbis, the Church Fathers, Freud and Jung”

If you are sincerely interested in having Rodger speak to your group, please send for details, dates, and fees at lectures@kamenetz.com

Literary agent for Rodger Kamenetz:

Katinka Matson
Brockman, Inc.
rights@brockman.com