Rodger Kamenetz is an award-winning poet, author, and teacher. Of his 12 books, his best known is The Jew in the Lotus, the story of rabbis making a holy pilgrimage through India to meet with the Dalai Lama. The author of seven poetry collections, Rodger has been called “the most formidable of the Jewish-American poets.” His memoir, Terra Infirma, was described as “one of the most beautiful books ever written about a mother and a son.”

When The History of Last Night’s Dream appeared in 2007, Oprah Winfrey interviewed him on her Soul Series program, saying, “What’s so exciting about this book is that it talks about how there’s a whole other life that we are living when we sleep, and that our dreams are there as offerings and gifts to us if we only recognize what the dreams are there to teach us.”

Rodger was born in Baltimore and educated at Yale, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins University. He lives in New Orleans and is Professor Emeritus, retiring with a dual appointment as Professor of English and Professor of Religious Studies, at LSU where he was also an LSU Distinguished Professor and Sternberg Honors Professor.

He currently works privately with clients, using Natural Dreamwork in a process of spiritual direction. Kamenetz is married to fiction writer Moira Crone. He is the father of Anya Kamenetz, an author and NPR reporter, and Kezia Vida, a Natural Dreamwork practitioner who co-hosted The Dreamwork Summit 2019 with her father.