David Biespiel

David Biespiel was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1964 and grew up in Houston, Texas. He has degrees from Boston University and the University of Maryland. A former NCAA scholarship diver who competed in the United States National Diving Championships, he continues to coach national, international and Olympic-caliber divers. The recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Individual Artist Award in Poetry from the Maryland Arts Council and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Biespiel has taught at several colleges, including Stanford University. He now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is Director and Writer-in-Residence of The Attic Writers’ Workshop and also teaches at Oregon State University.

Biespiel’s second book of poems, Wild Civility, was published in 2003 by University of Washington Press in a new series edited by Linda Bierds. His first book of poems, Shattering Air, was published by BOA Editions in 1996. He writes a monthly poetry column for The Oregonian and edits the recently revived Poetry Northwest, once revered as the longest-running poetry-only journal in the United States, and now back in print in a new format.

To purchase Biespiel's books online, use these shopping links:

• Shattering Air (New Poets of America series, BOA Editions, 1996)
  
  
  
• Wild Civility (Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, University of Washington Press, 2003)
  

For samples of Biespiel’s work, browse these links:

• Three of his poems are posted as both text & audio (read by the author) in the first issue of The New Hampshire Review.
• “Proclitic” and “Sleeping Beauty” were published in the “Free Form” issue of Perihelion (at WebdelSol).
• Streaming video of Biespiel reading “Hallucination: Mushrooms” is online at the University of Portland’s Readings and Lectures page.
• He has written an essay on life as a poetry columnist, “Poetry on Deadline,” for the new Poetry Foundation site.

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Archive of Winning Poems from the IBPC

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