“[Dobyns’ poetry] has a somber, eccentric beauty not quite like anything else around these days.”—The New York Times Book Review “[Dobyns] blends philosophical musings with daft, deft metaphors and a cheeky vernacular.”—Poetry Poet and best-selling novelist Stephen Dobyns employs everything from Atlantic seascapes to werewolf dreams to explore issues public and private. By turns tough and tender, Dobyns’ plainspoken poems create and reflect a worldview full of possibilities. He contrasts the quotidian with the exalted, always delivered in a precise, familiar voice. Daily walks become meditations on politics, philosophy, literature, and the larger considerations of existence and being. Stephen Dobyns is the author of twenty-one books of fiction, including the popular Saratoga crime series, twelve books of poetry, and a collection of nonfiction. Dobyns has worked as a reporter for The Detroit News and has taught at the University of Iowa, Sarah Lawrence College, Warren Wilson College, Syracuse University, and Boston University. He lives in Rhode Island.
Author
Dobyns was raised in New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. He was educated at Shimer College, graduated from Wayne State University, and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1967. He has worked as a reporter for the Detroit News. He has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University. In much of his poetry and some works of non-genre fiction, Dobyns employs extended tropes, using the ridiculous and the absurd as vehicles to introduce more profound meditations on life, love, and art. He shies neither from the low nor from the sublime, and all in a straightforward narrative voice of reason. His journalistic training has strongly informed this voice.
