In addition to his teaching, Rader is a prolific reviewer, a scholar of film and art, and an award-winning poet. His poem "Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934" won the Sow's Ear Review poetry prize in 2009, judged by Kelly Cherry. Rader's debut poetry collection, Works and Days, won the 2010 Truman State University T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, judged by Claudia Keelan. Works & Days was also named a finalist for the Bob Bush Memorial First Book Award, and it won the Writer's League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. In addition to Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, Rader published two other books in 2017, including a collection of poems co-written with Simone Muench, entitled Suture, also known as the "Frankenstein Sonnets." He also edited Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, which was published by Beacon Press. This book contains 50 poems by major American poets, and each poem is paired with a response by a survivor of a shooting, a community activist, or a leader in the gun violence prevention movement. Widely praised, Bullets into Bells was recognized by The New York Times, The Washington Post, PBS, Poets & Writers, Rain Taxi, and many other publications. Rader's 2014 collection, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a book that explores the connection between poetry and painting, was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the year's Best Books of Poems. He was also the recipient of the George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Harvard poet and critic Stephen Burt selected a folio of Rader's poems entitled "American Self-Portrait" for the 2015 award. In 2011, Rader wrote a series of columns for the San Francisco Chronicle on The 10 Greatest Poets, which received media coverage in The New York Times. That same year, Rader began a blog called 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, which posted 99 poems over 99 days. The blog featured poems by well-known writers like LeAnne Howe, Matthew Zapruder, Robert Pinsky, Martha Collins, Heid Erdrich, Edward Hirsch, Timothy Donnelly, Maxine Chernoff, Camille T. Dungy, and Bob Hicok as well as beginning and non-professional poets. In 2014, 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry, was published in book form. In August, it debuted at #2 on the Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller List and in September, it took over the #1 spot. Presently, Rader is reported to be at work on an anthology of Native American Poetry and is writing a book of poems about the painter Cy Twombly.
