Rutgers–Camden Professor Named Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has selected Rutgers–Camden’s Patrick Rosal as its 2026 Poet-in-Residence.
The distinguished professor in the Department of English and Communication and inaugural campus director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice will serve as the Guggenheim’s fifth poet-in-residence through the end of the year.
Rosal, who joined the Rutgers–Camden faculty in 2011, has authored five poetry collections—most recently The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems (Persea, 2021), which won the William Carlos Williams Book Award. He has earned fellowships from the John Simon Guggeneim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Research Scholar program.
Throughout his Guggenheim residency, Rosal will design programs that connect poetry and community engagement with workshops and programs at the iconic site of modern and contemporary art.
“My intention is to reach out to people in the New York City, metropolitan and tri-state areas, to expand the communities that consider the Guggenheim a place that they can go to, to be not just a place to visit, but a place where they can contribute to the art making itself,” he said.
His project for the Guggenheim, titled The Water Listeners, will leverage the essential element as a channel for connection and gathering. This exploration of water will build off of The Quilting Water Public Arts Project, which Rosal spearheaded at Rutgers.
Through Quilting Water, student artists from the New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden campuses gathered interviews about people’s experiences with water from all over the world. Many of those stories were then constructed into quilts by local fabric artisans.
The Rutgers students involved brought many art disciplines to the project, from the written word to photography and music, something Rosal is keen on incorporating into the museum residency. It also speaks to Rosal’s own background. A musician, composer, and dancer, the professor hopes his most well-known medium will be a conduit through which many art forms will emerge.
“What I wanted to do with Quilting Water was to explode the idea of this narrow definition of poetry,” he said. “Poetry belongs to a constellation and is itself a constellation of art making. It has always encouraged this other sense of belonging and connectedness to our time and across time.
“Quilting Water grew and was cultivated and changed and emanated from that determination and that philosophy, and so by extension, The Water Listeners wants to do that,” he added.
Since his selection as Poet-in-Residence, Rosal has already engaged graduate students in his “Craft: Study in Poetic Forms” course in the programming details, including what the professor called experiments that can be scaled up for the museum, as had been done with Quilting Water. “There's a laboratory for collaborative imagination, and I love to include my students in that laboratory,” he said.
Programming for The Water Listeners is slated to begin in the late spring to early summer; in the meantime, Rosal will speak at the Guggenheim as Poet-in-Residence on April 26.
