Cary Selden Rodman (February 19, 1909 – November 2, 2002) was a prolific American writer of poetry, plays and prose, political commentary, art criticism, Latin American and Caribbean history, biography and travel writing—publishing a book almost every year of his adult life, he also co-edited Common Sense magazine.

Born on February 19, 1909, to architect Cary Selden Rodman and Nannie Van Nostrand (Marvin). He had one sibling, Nancy Gardiner Macdonald, who married Dwight Macdonald in 1934. He attended The Loomis Institute and Yale University. With William Harlan Hale, he was founder and editor of the campus magazine The Harkness Hoot (1930–31). Following university, he edited, with Alfred Mitchell Bingham, the political monthly Common Sense (1932–43). He served as Master Sgt. O.S.S. in the U.S. Army (1943–45).

Rodman was first published as a poet in 1932. Mortal Triumph and Other Poems was followed by narrative poems and the verse play The Revolutionists in 1942. His last book of poetry, Death of a Hero, published in 1964, imagines the scene of the plane crash and death of Sir Frederick Banting, discoverer of insulin, and was illustrated by the artist, Seymour Leichman.

Editor of seminal anthologies, A New Anthology of Modern Poetry, was 'the first anthology of its kind to include Negro folk-songs, light verse and satire, choruses from the experimental theater and a sound-track from a pioneer movie'. 100 American Poems included lyric, epic and ballad works from colonial times through 1948.

Selden Rodman and Alfred Bingham co-edited the socialist magazine for around a decade between 1932 and 1943. Serving as a monthly periodical with the mission statement "A monthly magazine of positive social action devoted to the elimination of war and poverty through democratic planning for abundance," Common Sense saw the likes of contributors such as Charles A. Beard, Thomas Hart Benton, Upton Sinclair, and others. They published articles with a wide range from historical reviews of arguments, opinionated editorials, general news articles, poetry, book and periodical reviews, advertisements for socialist pamphlets, and reader responses to previous editions. Selden and Alfred communicated virtually daily on the issues that were pertinent to the months edition, whom to have write a piece, how radical they wanted to make the magazine, what other periodicals were producing, and how to address those issues if needed.

Rodman married his first wife, Eunice Clark, in 1933, and his second wife, Hilda Clausen, in 1938. In 1950 he married Maia Wojciechowska and their daughter Oriana, was born in 1951. He married Carole Cleaver in 1962 and with her had two children, Carla and Van Nostrand.

He died on November 2, 2002, in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

Regarding self-taught, naïve, and primitive artists he admired, Rodman said, '...by their intuitive grasp of the principles of composition, color, and accommodation to the flatness of the picture-plane, (they) achieve the same quality of timelessness as the Masters. There is the same sense of arrested mobility; the same transformation of the humble into the noble, the here-and-now into forever.'