Rodger Kamenetz at the Jewish Public Library, Montreal
Rodger Kamenetz is an award-winning poet and author, teacher and dream therapist. 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.”
In 2007,The History of Last Night’s Dream, was published and featured on Oprah Winfrey’s Soul Series. In this book, 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. In October 2010, Burnt Books will be published in the Nextbook Jewish Encounters series, by Schocken Books/Nextbook Press.
Rodger Kamenetz retired from Louisiana State University in 2010 as the Erich and Lea Sternberg Honors Professor and as an LSU Distinguished Professor. He held a dual appointment as a Professor in the Department of English and in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He was 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.