{{short description|American poet (born 1963)}} {{infobox writer | name = D. A. Powell | birth_name = Douglas A. Powell | birth_date = {{birth date and age|1963|5|16}} | birth_place = Albany, Georgia, U.S. | occupation = Poet | education = Lindhurst High School<br>Sonoma State University<br>Iowa Writers' Workshop | awards = Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards (2010) }} '''Douglas A. Powell''' (born May 16, 1963) is an American poet.<ref>[https://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1136 D. A. Powell page at the Academy of American Poets Website]</ref>
==Life and career== Powell lived in various places growing up, then graduated high school from Lindhurst High School in Olivehurst, California. He then worked in a number of jobs before eventually settling in Santa Rosa, California, where he attended Sonoma State University.<ref>{{cite journal |url=http://www.poetryflash.org/archive.284.Witt.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030414172527/http://www.poetryflash.org/archive.284.Witt.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=2003-04-14 |title=Interview with D. A. Powell |last1=Witt |first1=Sam |last2=Durkin |first2=Sean |journal=Poetry Flash |issue=284 |date=February–March 2000 }}</ref> He earned a bachelor's degree in 1991 and a master's in 1993. Not long after completing his graduate work at Sonoma State, he entered the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa.
In 1996, he graduated from Iowa and began a career as a poet and university professor. Powell has taught at a number of different universities, including Columbia University, Sonoma State University, San Francisco State University, and Harvard University, where he served as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry. In 2004, Powell left Harvard for the University of San Francisco, where he teaches in the English department.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.usfca.edu/facultydetails.aspx?id=4294969495 |title=University of San Francisco (USF) - Douglas Powell |access-date=2011-05-12 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120122021858/http://www.usfca.edu/facultydetails.aspx?id=4294969495 |archive-date=2012-01-22 |url-status=dead }}</ref>
== Awards and recognition == In addition to serving as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard (itself a recognition of both creative and scholarly talent),<ref>http://www.usfca.edu/Newsroom/Learning/USF_Poet_s_Success_is_Chronic/{{Dead link|date=July 2019 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref> Powell has won the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, a grant for the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Paul Engle Fellowship. His second collection, ''Lunch,'' was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and his third book, ''Cocktails'', was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
On February 3, 2010, after the publication of ''Chronic'' in 2009, Claremont Graduate University announced that Powell had won its prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.<ref>{{cite news| url=https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/02/da-powell-wins-100000-prize-for-poetry.html| title=D.A. Powell wins $100,000 prize for poetry| work=The Los Angeles Times| date=February 2, 2010}}</ref><ref>Chronicle of Higher Education, February 4, 2010 [http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Lucrative-Poetry-Awards-Go-to/21068/?sid=at link]</ref> ''Chronic'' also won the 2009 Northern California Book Award and the 2009 California Book Award.
He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.<ref>[http://www.gf.org/fellows/17035-d-a-powell D. A. Powell - John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110416022005/http://www.gf.org/fellows/17035-d-a-powell |date=April 16, 2011 }}</ref>
His poetry collection ''Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys'' won the National Book Critics Circle Award (2012).<ref>{{cite web |url=http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/national-book-critics-circle-names-2012-award-finalists/ |title=National Book Critics Circle Names 2012 Award Finalists |work=The New York Times |author=John Williams |date=January 14, 2012 |accessdate=January 15, 2013}}</ref><ref name=nyt2012>{{cite web |url=http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/robert-a-caro-ben-fountain-among-national-book-critics-circle-winners/ |title=Robert A. Caro, Ben Fountain Among National Book Critics Circle Winners |work=The New York Times |author=John Williams |date=March 1, 2013 |accessdate=March 1, 2013}}</ref>
In 2019, Powell received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://artsandletters.org/pressrelease/2019-literature-award-winners/|title=2019 Literature Award Winners – American Academy of Arts and Letters|language=en-US|access-date=2020-02-07}}</ref>
== Work == Considered by some an experimental poet, Powell mixes both conventional and non-conventional techniques. For example, his early poems do not have titles; the first lines serve as the poems' working titles. He also does not capitalize the first letter of a new sentence; in this sense, he is reminiscent of E. E. Cummings. His work often moves back and forth between popular culture like movies and music and more complicated themes like religion and AIDS; he uses numerous rhetorical devices, especially puns, as bridges between these two spheres of experience. Powell's first three books of poems are considered a kind of trilogy on the AIDS epidemic.
Writing in ''The New York Times'', critic Stephanie Burt said of Powell's work, "No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible."<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/da-powell |title=D.A. Powell : The Poetry Foundation |access-date=2011-05-12 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110420142114/http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/da-powell |archive-date=2011-04-20 |url-status=dead }}</ref>
== Bibliography ==
===Poetry=== * {{cite book |first=D. A. |last=Powell |author-mask=2 |title=Tea |publisher=Wesleyan University Press |year=1998 |isbn=9780819563347}} * {{cite book |first=D. A. |last=Powell |author-mask=2 |title=Lunch |publisher=Wesleyan University Press |year=2000 |isbn=9780819564276}} * {{cite book |first=D. A. |last=Powell |author-mask=2 |title=Cocktails |publisher=Graywolf Press |year=2004 |isbn=9781555973957}} * {{cite book |first=D. A. |last=Powell |author-mask=2 |title=Chronic |publisher=Graywolf Press |year=2009 |isbn=9781555975166}} * {{cite book |first=D. A. |last=Powell |author-mask=2 |title=Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys |publisher=Graywolf Press |year=2012 |isbn=9781555976057}}
===Anthologies=== * {{cite book |first= |last= |author-mask=2 |title=The New Young American Poets: An Anthology |editor=Kevin Prufer |publisher=SIU Press |year=2000 |isbn=9780809323098 |pages=137–142}}
===Prose=== * {{cite book |first=D. A. |last=Powell |author-mask=2 |title=By Myself: An Autobiography |publisher=Turtle Point Press |year=2009}} == References == {{reflist}}
== External links == *[https://web.archive.org/web/20110809185714/http://triquarterly.org/bios/da-powell Two poems in ''Triquarterly''] *[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=81084 Eleven poems by D. A. Powell at the Poetry Foundation] *[http://www.vanderbilt.edu/english/nashvillereview/archives/2360 Interview with D. A. Powell in Nashville Review]{{Dead link|date=May 2025 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} *[https://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2004/07/photo-by-kevin-killian-d-powells-most.html Doug Powell page at the Here Comes Everybody Blog] *[https://www.nytimes.com/audiopages/2004/08/15/books/20040815_POWELL_AUDIO.html A Poetry Reading by Powell from The New York Times] *[http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/panic-in-the-year-zero Panic in the Year Zero], a new poem for Harvard Class Day, "Panic in the Year Zero", May 26, 2010. *[https://rose.library.emory.edu/ Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library], Emory University: [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/bcgsq D.A. Powell papers]
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Powell, D. A.}} Category:American male poets Category:1963 births Category:Living people Category:Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni Category:American gay writers Category:American LGBTQ poets Category:Poets from Georgia (U.S. state) Category:21st-century American poets Category:21st-century American male writers Category:21st-century American LGBTQ people Category:Gay poets