Before the Borderless

About the Author

Dean Rader's most recent book from Copper Canyon Press, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (2017), was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. He is also the author of Works & Days which won the 2010 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the Bush Memorial Prize, and won the Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Prize. His 2014 collection Landscape Portrait Figure Form was named by The Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book. Often engaging in collaborative projects, Rader is also the co-author of a book of collaborative sonnets entitled Suture with the poet Simone Muench, and he co-edited Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence with Brian Clements and Alexandra Teague. He and pressmate Victoria Chang began a collaborative poetry review series titled "Two Roads: Poetry in Dialogue" for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (1928-2011) was was an American painter, sculptor and photographer born in Lexington, Virginia. From 1948 to 1952, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Washington and Lee University, Lexington; the Art Students League, New York; and, Black Mountain College in North Carolina. His best-known works are typically large-scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of neutral colors. His later paintings and works on paper shifted toward "romantic symbolism." Twombly often quoted poets such as Stephane Mallarme, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Keats, as well as classical myths and allegories, in his works. Permanent collections of Twombly's art can be found in modern art museums globally, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Munich's Museum Brandhorst. He was commissioned for a ceiling at the Musee du Louvre in Paris and died on July 5, 2011 in Rome.