Don Colburn was born in Georgia, grew up in Massachusetts and now lives
in Portland, Oregon, where he is a reporter for The Oregonian. He
became interested in poetry and started writing poems while on
a mid-career Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. Two of his
manuscripts won national contests for publication in 2006. His
poetry chapbook, Another
Way to Begin, won the
Finishing Line Press Prize. A full-length
collection, As
If Gravity Were a Theory, won the Cider Press Review Book Award.
Colburn went to Amherst College and has an MFA in creative writing
from Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared in magazines
such as Alaska
Quarterly Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest,
Prairie Schooner and Virginia
Quarterly Review and have won The Iowa Review’s
McGinnis Award, The Madison Review’s Felix Pollak
Award and the Discovery/The
Nation Award. Twice, he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
He worked for many years at The Washington Post and
has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.
He is a board member of the Friends of William Stafford.