A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven and Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the 2024 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. A selected essays, Textual Preference, will be out from Nightboat Books in 2027.
After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, Brian is now a Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. His other honors include Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, and fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the MacDowell Colony. An editorial board member of Poetry Daily, he lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
A respected and sought-after educator, Brian has visited writing programs, classrooms, and poetry institutions across the United States. He is regularly on the faculty of Napa Valley Writers Conference and of the Rainier Writers Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. A former Elliston Poet-in-Residence at the University of Cincinnati, Helen Zell Visiting Writer at the University of Michigan, and Allen Ginsberg Fellow at Naropa University, Brian is available for readings, lectures, workshops, and classroom visits. Please contact bt5ps@virginia.edu for more information.
Author photo credit: Kristen Finn.