Award-Winning Poet Dean Rader Works his Frog and Toad Obsession

​ Dean Rader is the hot poet of the moment around here; totally the Paris Hilton of everything that Paris Hilton isn't. Minibio: He's from Western Oklahoma. He formerly held the post of dean at the University of San Francisco, where he still teaches, briefly causing him to be Dean Dean. Bail-bonding runs in his family. He seems obsessed by the Frog and Toad books. Are these the elements that led him to a life of hardcore poetry? Where the hell else would they lead a man? (Drugs and/or religion.)

Rader recently won the Literary Death Match; we're pretty sure this is how he got hot.

​His new book Works and Days won the T.S. Eliot Prize, and it genuinely contains not only "Frog and Toad Confront the Alterity of Otherness," but also "Frog Loses Sleep Puzzling Over Parallel Universes," "Frog Seeks Help with Anger Management," and "Frog and Toad Sing the Birthday Blues." If you think those might be funny poems, or light poems, or poems none of which won the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize, see Rader and a cohort read at the North Beach Branch Library on Tuesday, June 14, at 7 p.m.