Joseph Radke is a poet living and writing in Wisconsin’s Fox River Valley. He grew up in northern Wisconsin as the youngest child (of eight) of a paper mill worker and church secretary. He earned a BS in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MA in American studies at Baylor University. He received his PhD in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he was a Chancellor Fellow.

After a long hiatus, he returned to serious creative writing late in 2023. His poems have appeared, and are forthcoming, in numerous national literary journals, including The Journal, Copper Nickel, Boulevard, Poetry East, Natural Bridge, Southern Poetry Review, Permafrost, Bicoastal Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Shore. The podcast Landward: Readings of Place and Season will feature two of Radke’s poems reflecting on the landscapes of his childhood. His work has won an Academy of American Poets University Prize and a Beall Poetry Festival Award. His manuscript is in search of a publisher.

When not writing in downtown Appleton’s coffee shops, he can be found scaling the hidden mountains of Wisconsin.

Picture of the Poet

Selected Publications

  • “Shape of a Day,” On the Seawall, (forthcoming)

  • “The Same Dog” and “Another Morning Poem,” Southern Poetry Review

  • “Eyewitness Testimony,” Packingtown Review

  • “When Your Backache Returns,” Bellevue Literary Review

  • “The Purpose of Poetry,” fsm.

  • “La Belle Époque,” Bicoastal Review

  • "You Can’t Separate Absence from Presence by Distance Alone,” The Shore

  • “Excerpts from a Calendar of Nights We Didn’t Meet (#1),” Permafrost

  • “Later That Evening,” Harpur Palate

  • “Kid Elektra,” New York Quarterly

  • “Rio de los Brazos de Dios” and “Even Misunderstanding is a Form of Understanding,” Epiphany

  • “On the Care and Feeding of Avocados” and “Back Beat,” Verse Wisconsin

  • “slow onset of stigmata” and “Night Without,” Copper Nickel

  • “Meditation on East Jarvis,” The Journal

  • “We Only Know It the Second Time,” Faultline

  • “Four Pests,” dislocate, a minnesota journal of writing and art

  • “Chances of Precipitation,” Natural Bridge

  • “What To Do,” “How I Came to Touch You Again” and “Will at Bay,” Versal

  • “This Much for Sure” and “Ice Forms on the Milwaukee River,” Boulevard

  • “Sacred Rites of Burial” and “Left Over,” Poetry East

  • “The Ice Fishermen of Oconto Falls,” Sojourn

  • “Unbound,” The Texas Observer

Read a selection of poems here.