Rosemarie Dombrowski

Rosemarie Dombrowski (RD) is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ, the founding director of Revisionary Arts, a nonprofit that facilitates therapeutic poetry workshops for vulnerable populations and the community at large, and a Teaching Professor at ASU who specializes in medical humanism/medical poetry, applications of narrative medicine for vulnerable populations, war poetry and memoir, underground print culture (zines), and journal production. She's also an Assistant Professor of Practice at U of A College of Medicine-Phoenix, where she serves as the faculty editor of Grey Matter, the school’s medical poetry journal.

RD’s applied work as a medical humanist, which focuses on poetic approaches to community-building and healing, spans the classroom, the healthcare system, and the community at large. She facilitates poetic medicine workshops for healthcare providers, caregivers, dementia patients, veterans, the formerly incarcerated, and other medically and socially vulnerable populations. She has given talks at the Mayo Clinic, Banner University Medical Center, the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix, the AZ Bioethics Network, the AZ Department of Health Services, Higher Ed Military, Burton Barr Library, the TEDx stage, and elsewhere.

RD has curated numerous public art projects including the 7th Ave. Streetscapes, Poetry Illuminated in the Park, and the Phoenix Community Poetry Gardens. Additionally, she has created/hosted community-based literary arts programming for over 20 years, including First Friday Poetry on Roosevelt Row, the Phoenix Poetry Series (a monthly, curated reading series that ran for 11 years), and Phoenix’s only literary salon, Get Lit: Conversations & Cocktails at Valley Bar. In 2020, she launched Arizona Humanities’ first digital program, AZ Poets Speak, for which she served as the curator and host during the pandemic. She’s also the founding editor of both rinky dink press (a publisher of micro-collections of micro-poetry) and The Revolution (Relaunch), an award-winning, creative resurgence of the official newspaper of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association.

Within the ASU community, RD is the founding editor of ISSUED: stories of service, a journal of poetry, prose, and interviews by and for active-duty and veterans and sponsored by OVMAE. She's also the creator and facilitator of Verse for Vets, a therapeutic poetry program for veterans, also sponsored by OVMAE. From 2007-2022, she was the faculty editor of Write On Downtown (2007-2022), an annual publication dedicated to showcasing the work of Phoenix creatives.

RD has published three collections of poetry including The Book of Emergencies (Five Oaks Press, 2014), a lyrical ethnography of the culture of nonverbal Autism, and The Cleavage Planes of Southwest Minerals [A Love Story], winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapbook competition. Her fourth collection, Emily’s Advice to Girls in the New Millenium, is forthcoming (October 2024) from Finishing Line Press. Her work has also been featured in Poetry Daily, poets.org, on the TEDx stage, on local NPR affiliates and national NPR podcasts, PBS, and elsewhere.

For her community-embedded work, RD has been the recipient of an Arts Hero Award, a Great 48 Award, a Women & Philanthropy grant, and Fellowships from the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics and the Academy of American Poets. In 2022, she was named Outstanding Speaker by Arizona Humanities, and in 2023, she received a Leader of the Year award from Arizona Capital Times (Arts & Culture category).

RD is the proud daughter of a primary-school educator and a veteran of the USMC (both deceased). She is the mother and caregiver of an adult son with nonverbal Autism and other disabilities. She’s also the adoptive mom of PB&J, an extraordinary litter of cats.

Learn more about her projects, publications, speaking engagements and readings at  www.rdpoet.com