Tim Seibles

Tim Seibles is an American poet and educator from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Born to an English teacher mother and a biochemist father who ensured their children were educated and carried themselves with pride, Seibles was drawn to reading at a young age—particularly Greek mythology and science fiction—as well as sports. In high school, he dreamed of being a professional football player who would write novels during the offseason, forever balancing the physical and philosophical. While he did initially attend Southern Methodist University for its football program, by the time he earned his BA he was fully dedicated to poetry. He would spend the next 10 years teaching high school English before earning his MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and publishing his earliest collections. The mood of Seibles’s writing oscillates from serious to sarcastic, dancing between themes like race, class tension, sex, and sports. He is a National Book Award-nominated author of eight collections of poetry and was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016 to 2018. He currently resides in Virginia and continues to teach literature in Old Dominion University’s MFA program.