Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned his BA from Wesleyan University and his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before attending Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry and later a Jones Lecturer in Poetry.
Barot is the author of poetry collections The Darker Fall (2002), recipient of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry; Want (2008), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and winner of the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and Chord (2015), a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and winner of the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Thom Gunn Award. His most recent book is 2020’s The Galleons (Milkweed), which was chosen as a Best Book of 2020 by the New York Public Library, a Pacific Northwest Book Awards finalist, and a National Book Award longlisted book. His chapbook During the Pandemic was also published in 2020.
A winner of the Shelley Memorial Award, Barot has received fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Yorker, and many other publications. Barot is a former poetry editor for the New England Review and has taught at universities including Stanford, California College of the Arts, George Washington University, Lynchburg College, and Warren Wilson College. He currently directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Tacoma, Washington.
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Photo by Rachel McCauley.