D. A. Powell

D. A. Powell is the author of five collections, including Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. His honors include the Kingsley Tufts Prize in Poetry, the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and the John Updike Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Powell's first three books, Tea (Wesleyan, 1998), Lunch (Wesleyan, 2000) and Cocktails (Graywolf, 2004), have been hailed as ground-breaking glimpses inside the Aids Pandemic, mixing disco culture, disaster movies and the New Testament with characteristically long prosodic lines punctuated internally by full stops and silences. Critic Stephanie Burt, writing in the New York Times, said of D. A. Powell “No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible.” Powell's fourth collection, Chronic, received the Kingsley Tufts Prize and the California Book Award, as well as being a finalist for the National Book Critics Award in Poetry. While continuing themes from his previous poems, Chronic expanded its universe into climate science and romantic love. Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys brought critical acclaim, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Northern California Book Reviewers Award, as well as being a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry. Elissa Schappell wrote in Vanity Fair’s “Hot Type,” “With his typical wry eroticism, an eagle eye for the places where men converge, and a compass that points always to desire, poet D. A. Powell leads us on a tour through a Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, from gay bars to bathhouses and into the backwoods.” D. A. Powell’s work appears in numerous anthologies, including The Yale Anthology of Devotional Poetry, Queer Nature, The Oxford Anthology of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, and four volumes of Best American Poetry. In 2015, Powell was honored by Out Magazine in their annual “Out 100” list of influential LGBT writers, artists, celebrities and activists. A former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University, Powell has taught at Stanford, Columbia, University of Texas at Austin, University of Iowa’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Davidson College. He is a Professor at University of San Francisco and lives in San Francisco. Powell’s most recent book is Repast: Tea, Lunch & Cocktails, a reissue of his first three collections with an introduction by novelist David Leavitt. A chapbook, Atlas T, was published by Rescue Press in Spring of 2020.