Richard Loranger is a multi-genre writer, performer, musician, voice artist, and text artist who has been working around the United States for over forty years. He has lived in many parts of the country, including New York, Austin, Boulder, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and San Francisco, and he currently lives and works in Oakland, CA.
He is the author of a recent chapbook of a crown of resistance sonnets, Breaking Crown (Collapse Press, 2026), along with six full-length books of poetry and flash prose including Mammal (Roof Books, 2023), Unit of Agency (Collapse Press, 2021; second edition 2024), Be a Bough Tit (Be About It Press, 2020), Sudden Windows (Zeitgeist Press, 2016), Poems for Teeth (We Press, 2005), and The Orange Book (International Review Press, 1990), along with ten other chapbooks, including 6 Questions, Hello Poems, and The Day Was Warm and Blue. His work has been included in over one hundred magazines and journals, and thirty anthologies, among which are Maintenant (Three Rooms Press), Arriving at a Shoreline and Escape Wheel (great weather for MEDIA); Marsh Hawk Review (Marsh Hawk Press), Poetry Flash, the online anthology HIV Here & Now; Overthrowing Capitalism Volume 2 (The Revolutionary Poets Brigade); Beyond the Rift: Poets of the Palisades (Poets Press); and Beyond Definition and Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapalooza (both Manic-D Press). He has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes (two of them for his fiction), and has a chapter on generative writing in the book Overton’s Garden by Tom Greenwood about shaping progressive change in the world. You can learn more about the latter book as well as read some online work at richardloranger.com/anthologies-journals.
He has done over 600 featured readings, in venues ranging from the Davis (CA) Jazz & Beat Festival to Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA, Intersection for the Arts, City Lights, Paradise Lounge, and Café Babar in San Francisco to The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, The Bowery Poetry Club, and Teachers and Writers in New York, to name a few, and has shared a bill with such poets and performers as Tongo Eisen-Martin, Bob Holman, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Andrei Codrescu, Kevin Killian, Jim Carroll, Anne Waldman, Francisco X. Alarcon, and The Last Poets, and the bands Fugazi, Big Black, Sister Double Happiness, The Dead Milkmen, and X. He has also been a member of several music and multi-disciplinary performance groups, including The Wandering Ensemble, Conspiracy of Beards, and The High Risk Group in the San Francisco Bay Area and Performance Art Church in Austin and New York.
As well he works beyond the page and stage in a few forms of visual art, some text-based and others not. Since 2001, he has had fourteen shows of his large, multi-colored poems called blinklists, in New York as well as Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, CA, and Worcester, MA. He produced about half of the pieces of calligraphic art for Poems for Teeth (along with artist Eric Waldemar), and has done the illustrations and design for most of his books. He also occasionally gives in to the urge to write poetry on objects, with a special fondness for mobius strips.
He has also co-written three screenplays with writer/director Graham H. Green, one of which, Force Drift, was made into a feature-length thriller starring Nichelle Nichols and Andrew Walker. Since mid-2025, it has been making the rounds at festivals.
Despite all this, he has had to keep many different jobs in order to keep himself alive, from waiting tables to painting ski lifts to teaching college. Currently he stays at home and makes up names for things. Maybe he will make up a name for you.
He wants only a calm moment.