David Biespiel...pronounced buy-speel...attended Beth Yeshurun, the oldest Jewish school in Houston. Reared in a family that valued athletic excellence (one brother was a member of the United States Gymnastics team), he competed in the U.S. Diving Championships against Olympians Greg Louganis and Bruce Kimball, and later coached and developed many regional and national champions and finalists in diving.

Living in Boston in the early 1980s, Biespiel was one of the central figures of Glenville Productions, a nexus of young writers, artists, educators, musicians, conservationists, and activists that included Rick Gifford, Paul Ruest, G. Nicholas Keller, Jeff Smith, Laura Sydell, Dayton Marcucci, Marc Maron, Mark Lurie, Laurie Geltman, and Jade Barker. He began publishing poems and essays in 1986 after moving to remote Brownsville, Vermont. From 1988-1993 he lived and wrote in Washington, DC, and from 1993-1995 in San Francisco. He has lived in Portland, Oregon since 1995.

He is a contributor to American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and Slate. After reviewing poetry for nearly fifteen years in journals and newspapers, including in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The New York Times, he has been, since January 2003, the poetry columnist for The Oregonian. The column is the longest running newspaper column on poetry in the U.S.

In 1999, he founded the Attic: A Haven for Writers. With its writers' workshops and individual consultations, the Attic has become the focal point for a vibrant literary community in Portland. Writers have seeded collaborations, writing groups, magazine start-ups, and literary friendships. They have signed with publishers and agents, been accepted into residencies and graduate programs, and embarked on literary enterprises of their own. Willamette Week named the Attic the best place to study writing in Portland.

In 2005 he was named editor of Poetry Northwest...one of the nation's most prestigious magazines devoted exclusively to poetry. He is credited with reviving the magazine to national prominence after it shuttered its doors in 2002 following four decades of continuous publication. He served as editor until 2010.

Since 2008 Biespiel has been a prominent contributor to The Politico's Arena, a cross-party, cross-discipline daily conversation about politics and policy among current and former members of Congress, governors, mayors, political strategists and scholars.

In 2010 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle.

He has taught creative writing and literature throughout the United States, including at George Washington University, University of Maryland, Stanford University, Portland State University, and Lynchburg College as the Richard H. Thornton Writer in Residence. He currently divides his teaching among the M.F.A. Program at Pacific Lutheran University, Oregon State University, and Wake Forest University, where he is poet in residence in the fall.

In 2010, Biespiel sparked a national debate about the relationship between poets and democracy with the publication of his essay, "This Land Is Our Land," in Poetry . Writing about the importance of citizen-poets, Biespiel contends that:

"Beyond the essential concern for writing poems, the poet’s role must also include public participation in the life of the Republic. By and large, poets have lived by the creed that this sort of exposure can be achieved only through the making of poems, that to be civically engaged in any other fashion would poison the creative self. But while poems are the symbolic vessels for the imagination and metaphor, there are additional avenues to speak to the tribe. The function of the poet may be to mythologize experience, but another function is to bring a capacity for insight...including spiritual insight...into contact with the political conditions of existence. The American poet must speak truth to power and interpret suffering. And just as soon as the American poet actually speaks in public about civic concerns other than poetry, both American poetry and American democracy will be better off for it."

Writing about the controversy in the March 11, 2010 online edition of The New York Times, Gregory Cowles commented, "I’m struck by the plaintive note that hums just beneath Biespiel’s argument: as much as it’s a rousing call to political action, his essay is also an eloquent statement of the anxiety of irrelevance." Cowles compares Biespiel's concerns to similar ones expressed by fiction writer David Foster Wallace: "For Biespiel, poetry doesn’t matter because poets aren’t political enough. For Wallace, poetry doesn’t matter because poets have neglected the common reader."

Poetry

• The Book of Men and Women, 2009 (Named 'Best Poetry of the Year' by The Poetry Foundation)
• Wild Civility, 2003
• Pilgrims & Beggars, 2002 (Awarded the Portlandia Prize)
• Shattering Air, 1996

Prose

• Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces, 2010

Edited Collections

• Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets, 2006 (Awarded the Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Award)
• Artists' Communities, 1996

Recording

Citizen Dave: Selected Poems 1996-2010