Biography

David J. Rothman was born in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1959.  He did his undergraduate work at Harvard and then received an MA in English from the University of Utah and a PhD in English from New York University.  He has lived in Crested Butte, Colorado, since 1993.  In the 1990s he co-founded and served as the first Executive Director of the Crested Butte Music Festival and then became the third Headmaster of Crested Butte Academy, an independent boarding and day school.  He has also served as Executive Director of the Robinson Jeffers Association and is the founding Publisher and Editor of Conundrum Press, a small press devoted to writers of the west, especially poets.  Rothman is the author of three books of poetry, Dominion of Shadow (1996), The Elephant’s Chiropractor  (1998), which was a finalist for the 1999 Colorado Book Award, and Beauty at Night (2002).  He is also the editor of The Geography of Hope: Poets of Colorado’s Western Slope. His poems have appeared in Agni, Appalachia, The Atlantic, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Mountain Gazette, Poetry, and scores of other journals.  His essays on a wide range of subjects have also appeared widely.  He works as a free-lance writer on a wide range of subjects and teaches part-time at Lighthouse Writers in Denver and at Western State College in Gunnison.  He lives in Crested Butte with his wife and two sons.