Named one of the Great 48 by Phoenix Magazine in 2020 and Speaker of the Year by Arizona Humanities in 2022, Rosemarie Dombrowski is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ.

Rosemarie (RD) is the founding editor of both rinky dink press (a nationally recognized publisher of micro-collections of micro-poetry) and The Revolution (Relaunch), an award-winning resurgence of the official newspaper of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association and founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. In 2020, she read Stanton’s germinal “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments” for the video 19th Amendment: 100 Years and Counted, produced by ASU.

In 2020, she founded Revisionary Arts, a nonprofit that provides therapeutic poetry workshops for vulnerable populations, the medical community, and the community at large. In April 2022, her talk entitled “The Medicinal Power of Poetry” was featured on the TEDx stage at Grand Canyon University.

Her literary arts advocacy has spanned nearly 20 years and has birthed numerous community-based projects. Her awards include a Women & Philanthropy grant, an Arts Hero Award (2017), the Carrie McCray Literary Award in Nonfiction (2017), a Fellowship from the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics (2017), and a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets (2020).

She’s published three collections of poetry to date: The Book of Emergencies (Five Oaks Press 2014) — a lyrical exploration of the world of nonverbal Autism — The Philosophy of Unclean Things (Finishing Line Press 2017), and The Cleavage Planes of Southwest Minerals [A Love Story], winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapbook competition. She’s also a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

In addition to numerous readings across the Southwest, she has been the featured poet at the AZ NOW Conference, the AZ Public Defenders Association Conference, the AZ Humanities Annual Awards Celebration, the 19th Amendment Celebration at City Hall, and the AZ Bioethics Conference. She was also a featured reader for the Phosphorescence Poetry Series at The Emily Dickinson Museum in 2021.

A Teaching Professor at Arizona State University’s Downtown Phoenix campus, she teaches courses on women’s literature, medical poetry, and journal curation/editing. Additionally, she is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Bioethics and Medical Humanism at the University of Arizona Biomedical campus in Phoenix, where she serves as the faculty editor for the medical poetry journal, Grey Matter.