Don Colburn

Don Colburn came to poetry late in the midst of a journalism career. A longtime reporter for The Washington Post and The Oregonian, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. He’s a graduate of Amherst College and has an MFA degree from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He has come to see journalism and poetry, for all their differences, as two kinds of witness, two ways of truth-telling and reporting on the world.

Colburn’s poems have appeared widely in literary journals, and he has published six poetry collections, including five chapbooks; all six won or placed in national manuscript competitions. His latest collection, Purchase, came out in 2025 from Finishing Line Press. His previous volume — Mortality, with Pronoun Shifts — won the 2018 Cathy Smith Bowers poetry award. Tomorrow Too: The Brenda Monologues is a sequence of poetic monologues based on the true story of a young woman facing breast cancer while pregnant — a story he first reported in The Oregonian. His full-length book, As If Gravity Were a Theory, won the Cider Press Book Award.

Other writing honors include the Discovery/The Nation Award, the Finishing Line Press Poetry Prize, the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo, and five Pushcart nominations. He lives in Falmouth, Maine.