Dobby Gibson

Born in Minneapolis, poet Dobby Gibson earned a BA at Connecticut College and an MFA at Indiana University. Originally in graduate school to study fiction, Gibson wrote his first poem at the age of 26. He described his defection from fiction in an interview with the online audio archive From the Fishouse: “I eventually spent all my time on my fiction working on beginnings and endings, and began to quit caring about plot and characters and the giant movie set scaffolding that fiction depends upon. One thing that made poetry really powerful and charged for me was that it wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing … I love that feeling of transgression I get from writing a poem.”

Gibson is the author of Little Glass Planet (2019) and It Becomes You (2013). His books Skirmish (2009) and Polar (2005) were both finalists for the Minnesota Book Award. Polar also won Alice James Books’ Beatrice Hawley Award. Of the poems in Skirmish, a Publishers Weekly review noted, “Gibson mixes the language of public discourse, science, TV and everyday conversation in a chatty if bleak voice that is both accessible and satisfyingly challenging.” Gibson’s free-verse poems combine lyric musicality, deconstructed aphorisms, and inventive humor.

Gibson’s honors include fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Jerome Foundation, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. He lives in Minneapolis.