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Rodger Kamenetz is a poet, author, professor emeritus of English and Religious Studies at LSU where he was founding director of the Jewish Studies minor. He is best known for The Jew in the Lotus (Harper) now in its 40th printing but he’s published twelve books of poetry and prose, among them Stalking Elijah (Harper) which won the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought and The History of Last Night’s Dream (Harper) which was featured on Oprah Winfrey’s Soul Series. His dual biography of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka was published in the Jewish Encounter Series as Burnt Books (Schocken/Nextbook, 2010). He is the author of The Lowercase Jew (Northwestern University Press). His poems were anthologized in Voices Within the Ark (Avon, 1979), Jewish American Poetry (Brandeis, 2000), Jewish in America (U. of Michigan Press), Bearing the Mystery (Eerdmans), Best Jewish Writing 2003 (Jossey Bass), Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Time Being), Telling and Remembering: a Century of American Jewish Poetry (Beacon, 1997), and The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Writing (Nebraska, 1998). His poems have appeared in Tikkun, The New Republic, Grand Street, Forward. His latest book, The Missing Jew: Poems 1976 – 2022 represents a forty-six year project in Jewish poetry.
