Photo: Chris Pichler

Norman Dubie

On April 10, 1945, Norman Dubie was born in Barre. He began writing poetry at eleven, and was influenced by John Keats and D. H. Lawrence. During Dubie's childhood, his father had a religious conversion, began studying theology, and moved the family to New Hampshire. The young Dubie watched his father become politically active in his parish and encourage support of the civil rights movement.

After finishing high school, Dubie had hoped to play football for West Point, but instead followed his father's wishes and enrolled at the University of New Hampshire at Durham, where he failed every subject except English and Geology. Dubie took nine months off from his studies and was later rejected by the draft due to high blood pressure. He enrolled at Goddard College in Vermont and received his BA in 1965. He then received a fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he earned his MFA in 1968, as well as an invitation to stay on as a member of the program's regular faculty.

Dubie's first book, Alehouse Sonnets, was written during a blizzard while he was still a graduate student. The manuscript of poems was chosen as a runner-up for the International Poetry Forum Prize and was later published by the University of Pittsburg Press in 1971. Richard Howard, one of the poets on the jury, urged Dubie to establish an MFA program at Arizona State University in Tempe, and in 1975 Dubie accepted a position there as consultant in the arts and launched their creative writing program, though he did not accept the title of director.

During 1975, Dubie published four books of poetry, and a year later received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Since then, he has published numerous collections of poetry, including The Volcano (Copper Canyon Press, 2010); The Insomniac Liar of Topo (2007); The Mercy Seat : Collected and New Poems 1967-2001 (2004);Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum (2004); The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems 1967-2001 (2001), Selected and New Poems (1986), and The Clouds of Magellan (1992). His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.