Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a writer and teacher. His first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, was chosen by Lisa Russ Spaar for the Vassar Miller Prize and published in 2012. The book received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, spent several weeks on the Poetry Foundation’s list of contemporary best sellers, and was featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch.

His poems have appeared in several publications, including 32 Poems, Guernica, Maine magazine, Prairie Schooner, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, and Verse Daily, and in the anthologies Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. He has received awards for his poems from the Bellevue Literary Review and University of California Berkeley

With graduate degrees from University of California Berkeley and Columbia University, he has taught writing and literature in public and private middle schools, high schools, and colleges in California, Vermont, New York, and Maine. In 2011, he was named one of Maine’s “emerging leaders” by the Portland Press Herald and MaineToday Media for his work directing the Telling Room, where he still occasionally teaches writing. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his family and is at work on a novel and a second book of poems.

[Photo: Derek Davis]