I am a multi-genre writer, performer, musician, and visual artist who has been working around the United States for over forty years. I’ve lived in many parts of the country, including New York, Austin, Boulder, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and San Francisco, and I currently live and work in Oakland, CA.

I’m the author of six books of poetry and flash prose, including Mammal (Roof Books, 2023), as well as Unit of Agency (Collapse Press, 2021), Be a Bough Tit (Be About It Press, 2020), Sudden Windows (Zeitgeist Press, 2016), Poems for Teeth (We Press, 2005), The Orange Book (International Review Press, 1990), and ten chapbooks, including 6 Questions, Hello Poems, and The Day Was Warm and Blue. My work has been included in over one hundred magazines and journals and thirty anthologies, among which are Maintenant (Three Rooms Press), Arriving at a Shoreline and Escape Wheel (great weather for MEDIA); Marsh Hawk Review, Poetry Flash, the online anthology HIV Here & Now;  Beyond the Rift: Poets of the Palisades (Poets Press); The Portable Boog Reader (Boog Literature), and Beyond Definition and Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapalooza (both Manic-D Press). Some of my work can be read online at richardloranger.com/anthologies-journals.

I’ve done over 500 featured readings, in venues ranging from the Davis (CA) Jazz & Beat Festival to Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA, Intersection for the Arts, City Lights, Paradise Lounge, and Café Babar in San Francisco to The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, The Bowery Poetry Club, and Teachers and Writers in New York, to name a few, and have shared a bill with such poets and performers as Tongo Eisen-Martin, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Andrei Codrescu, Kevin Killian, Jim Carroll, Anne Waldman, Francisco X. Alarcon, and The Last Poets, and the bands Fugazi, Big Black, Sister Double Happiness, The Dead Milkmen, and X. I’ve also been a member of several music and performance groups, including Conspiracy of Beards and The High Risk Group in San Francisco and Performance Art Church in Austin and New York.

As well I work beyond the page and stage in a few forms of visual art, some text-based and others not. Since 2001, I have had fourteen shows of my large, multi-colored poems called blinklists in New York as well as Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, CA, and Worcester, MA. I produced about half of the pieces of calligraphic art for Poems for Teeth (along with artist Eric Waldemar), and have done the illustrations and design for most of my books. I also occasionally give in to the urge to write poetry on objects, with a special fondness for mobius strips.

Despite all this, I have had to keep many different jobs in order to keep myself alive, from waiting tables to painting ski lifts to teaching college. Currently I stay at home and make up names for things. Maybe I will make up a name for you.

You can read more about my work at www.richardloranger.com.