David J. Rothman

When young, David J. Rothman had the good fortune to study with Czesław Miłosz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand, Robert Fitzgerald, Harold Bloom and Denis Donoghue, among others. He has published seven volumes of poetry, most recently "The Radio Poems" (Middle Creek, 2025), which collects all the poems he wrote when serving as Colorado Public Radio's Resident Poet in the 2010s. Other volumes include "My Brother’s Keeper" (Lithic Press, 2019) and "The Elephant’s Chiropractor" (Conundrum Press, 1998), both of which were Finalists for the Colorado Book Award. Over the last 40 years hundreds of his poems and essays have appeared (or are forthcoming...) in Appalachia, The Atlantic, Copper Nickel, The Formalist, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The Journal, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Light, Measure, Nimrod, Poetry, The Threepenny Review and scores of other newspapers, magazines, and journals. In 2018 he won a Pushcart Prize for the poem “Kernels,” which originally appeared in The New Criterion. In 2013 he published "Living the Life: Tales from America’s Mountains & Ski Towns," based on decades of experience in the ski and ski-mountaineering world. He is co-author, with Stanley Rothman and Stephen Powers, of "Hollywood’s America: Social and Political Themes in Motion Pictures." His most recent full-length critical book (co-edited with Jeffrey Villines) is "Belle Turnbull: On the Life and Work of an American Master," published by Pleiades Press in 2017 in their Unsung Masters series. Another recent work is a poetry textbook, "Learning the Secrets of English Verse," co-authored with Susan Spear, which appeared from Springer in August 2022.

Rothman served for many years as a teacher and an arts and academic administrator. Most recently, he served as President/CEO of the Jackson Hole Center for the Arts, in Jackson, Wyoming. Before that he served as Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University, where he designed the Poetry Concentration, which he also directed and in which he taught. At Western he also directed the annual international writers’ conference “Writing the Rockies” and edited THINK, a literary journal, which he is now co-editing again, with Susan Spear. In the past he has also taught at the University of Colorado Boulder, New York University, the University of Utah, and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China, along with many secondary schools and programs such as the HighCroft School, People’s Firehouse (a GED program in New York City) and DaySpring (a drug rehabilitation center for adolescents in Salt Lake City). He regularly teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where he first taught in 1998.

Rothman is co-Founder and served as first Executive Director of the Crested Butte Music Festival, Founding Editor and Publisher of Conundrum Press (now a division of Globe Pequot), co-founder of the Gunnison Valley Literary Festival, and served for six years as Headmaster of Crested Butte Academy, an independent school in Colorado, for which he also designed the curriculum as Chair of English and Dean of Academics. He has edited many journals, including THINK, Don’t Just Sit There (Co-Founder), Couloir (Contributing Editor) and PSA News: The Newsletter of the Poetry Society of America (Editor). He is a former Executive Director and President of the Robinson Jeffers Association and has served on a number of non-profit boards, including those of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers (ALSCW), the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), the Boulder Philharmonic, and Friends of the Nebraska Repertory Theater. He has served on grant review panels for the NEH, Colorado Creative Industries and many other organizations, along with serving as judge for poetry prizes from the Frost Farm, the Utah State Poetry Society, the Center of the American West, the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and many others. He served a term as Poet Laureate of Colorado’s Western Slope (2017-’18).