Biography

Wesley Rothman is the author of SUBWOOFER (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2017). His poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Humanities Review, and The Golden Shovel Anthology, among other venues. A former Teaching Artist for the National Gallery of Art, Rothman has received fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. His poems have garnered special recognition through the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, La Maison Baldwin, the New England Poetry Club, Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize, the Mississippi Review, the Bellingham Review, Emory University, Emerson College, and the University of San Diego.

After earning a BA from USD and an MFA from Emerson, Rothman completed the PhD in American literature at Catholic University with his dissertation, "American Racial Poetics Through Baraka's Blues: Some Case Studies, 1928-2022." His research interests include 20th and 21st century American Poetry confronting racism, Black Poetry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Jake Adam York, Natasha Trethewey, Terrance Hayes, James Baldwin, and Kiese Laymon.

He is at work, editing The Complete Poems of Jake Adam York; completing his second collection of poems, Wanted; and developing articles about Robert Penn Warren and Gwendolyn Brooks. He also plans to transform his dissertation into a monograph and develop an instructional memoir concerning the pedagogy of critical thought, rhetoric, and writing.