Deborah Marie Poe's Page

Deborah Poe is assistant professor of English at Pace University and fiction editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. She is the author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010) and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008). She has received several literary awards including three Pushcart Prize nominations for her poetry and the Thayer Fellowship of the Arts (2008) for her poetry and fiction.

Deborah’s writing is forthcoming or has appeared in Sidebrow, Ploughshares, Filter Literary Journal, Denver Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Drunken Boat and other journals as well as in the anthologies Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS From the Black Diaspora (Third World Press 2007), A Generation Defining Itself: In Our Own Words (MWE 2010) and A Sing Economy (Flim Forum 2008). Deborah is also co-editor of the short fiction anthology, provisionally entitled “Between Worlds,” with her colleague Ama Wattley.

Deborah was born a military brat in Del Rio, Texas and has lived throughout the United States and abroad. After her undergraduate studies, she worked in various positions including hostel clerk and bartender in Paris, environmental activist in Austin, a waitress in Taos, engineering assistant at Oregon Steel Mill in Portland, editor and international program manager in Seattle and educator in Washington and New York.


She has taught at Western Washington University, where she received her Master of Arts, and at Binghamton University, SUNY, where she received her doctoral degree. She has also taught as afternoon faculty at the Port Townsend Writer’s Workshop in Washington.


More information can be found throughout her web site, including upcoming readings and audio/video of past performances.