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.