Don Colburn was born in Georgia, grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Portland, Oregon. A longtime newspaper reporter for The Washington Post and The Oregonian, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, he became interested in poetry while on a midcareer Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. He has published three collections of poetry, most recently a chapbook titled Because You Might Not Remember.

Colburn is a graduate of Amherst College and has an MA in journalism from American University and an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. His first chapbook of poems, Another Way to Begin, won the Finishing Line Press Prize, and his full collection, As If Gravity Were a Theory, won the Cider Press Review Book Award. His poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Alaska Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest and Southern Poetry Review. His many writing awards include the Felix Pollak Prize, the McGinnis Award, the Discovery/The Nation Award and the Duckabush Prize for Poetry. He has received fellowships from the Centrum Arts Foundation and The MacDowell Colony, and twice was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is a board member of Friends of William Stafford.