David Biespiel

Founder, Director, & Writer-in-Residence

David Biespiel is widely recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation, a liberal commentator on national politics, & also one of the nation's experts in teaching writing. His teaching experience is innovative & vast: He has taught at every level of education, from a one-room schoolhouse to large university campuses, from public high schools to graduate seminars, from teaching poetics at Stanford University to developing national champions in the Olympic sport of diving, & he has lectured and spoken to audiences throughout the United States. Looking to create an independent writing studio in 1999, David founded the Attic as a haven for writers in Portland's historic Hawthorne district.

Among his publications are Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars, Wild Civility, & The Book of Men and Women which was named Best Poetry of the Year for 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. He has been honored with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a Lannan Fellowship, & a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature.

David has taught at many colleges, including Stanford, George Washington University, University of Maryland, & Portland State University, & he has been the Richard H. Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College in Virginia. He currently divides his teaching among three universities: in the fall as the Visiting Poet at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the spring as an Adjunct Professor at Oregon State University, & in the summer on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. Program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

A contributor to American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Poetry, Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, & The New Republic, David has been, since 2002, the columnist on poetry for The Oregonian, making his the longest-running newspaper column on poetry in the country.

In 2005 he was named editor of Poetry Northwest--resurrecting the esteemed magazine into a national venue for outstanding poems and a lively discourse about poetry and public culture--& served as editor until 2010.

Since 2008, he as been a frequent contributor to Politico's "Arena," a cross-party, cross-discipline daily conversation about politics and policy among more than a hundred current and former members of Congress, governors, mayors, political strategists and scholars.

In 2010 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle.

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