David Biespiel

Poet, novelist, and painter David Biespiel grew up in the Meyerland section of Houston, Texas. He earned his MFA at the University of Maryland, where he studied under Stanley Plumly and Michael Collier. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including: Beautiful Is the World: New and Selected Poems, 1996 - 2026 (2026), Republic Café (2019), Charming Gardeners (2014), The Book of Men and Women (2013), winner of the Stafford Hall Award, Wild Civility (2003), and Shattering Air (1996). He is the author of the novel A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love (2022). His essay collections include Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces (2010) and A Long High Whistle: Selected Columns on Poetry (2015), which received the Frances Fuller Victor Award. He is also the author of the memoirs A Place of Exodus: Home, Memory, and Texas (2020) and The Education of a Young Poet (2017), named one of Poets & Writers's Best Books for Writers. Biespiel has been a columnist for The Rumpus, and his poetry and prose have also appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, New Republic, The New Yorker, Slate, Poetry magazine, and the New York Times, among other publications. From 1995 to 2000, Biespiel was the editor of Poetry Northwest.

He has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award's Balakian Award, has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. He has taught at Stanford, University of Maryland, George Washington University, Portland State University, the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program, and Wake Forest University, in addition to other colleges and universities. The founder of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters, he is a longtime faculty member and poet-in-residence at Oregon State University.