David Biespiel

President of the Attic Institute

David Biespiel is widely recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation, a liberal commentator on national politics, and also one of the nation's experts in teaching writing. His teaching experience is innovative and 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, and he has lectured and spoken to audiences throughout the United States.

Looking to create an independent writing studio in 1999, David founded the Attic Institute 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 Foundatio and also received the Oregon Book Award, and Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces. He has been honored with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature.

David has taught at many colleges, including Stanford, George Washington University, University of Maryland, and Portland State University, and 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, and 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, and 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--and 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 a panelist for the literature fellowships in poetry for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Also, in 2010, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle where he serves as a judge for the NBCC annual book awards.

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