Don Colburn grew up in Massachusetts and lives in Maine. A longtime 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 mid-career Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University. He has come to view poetry and journalism as two ways of truth-seeking and reporting on the world.
Colburn is the author of six poetry collections, including a chapbook forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. All six won or placed in national manuscript competitions. His full-length book, As If Gravity Were a Theory, won the Cider Press Review Book Award, and his first chapbook, Another Way to Begin, won the Finishing Line Press Poetry Prize. Another collection, Mortality, with Pronoun Shifts, won the Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Contest. Tomorrow Too: The Brenda Monologues is a sequence of informal sonnets based on the true story of a young woman facing breast cancer while pregnant. His poems have appeared widely in leading journals.
A graduate of Amherst College, Colburn has an MA in journalism from American University and an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. His writing honors also include the Discovery/The Nation Award, the McGinnis Award, the Blethen Award for Distinguished Newspaper Reporting, the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo. He’s a former board member of Friends of William Stafford.