Derek Sheffield

Derek Sheffield was born in Portland, Oregon, on June 17, 1968. He received a BA in English from the University of Washington, an MA in teaching from Seattle University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. 

Sheffield is the author of several books, including Not for Luck (Michigan State University Press, 2021), selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize; Through the Second Skin (Orchises Press, 2013), a runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award; and A Revised Account of the West (Flyway/Iowa State University, 2008), winner of the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award. He coedited, with CMarie Fuhrman and Elizabeth Bradfield, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023), winner of a 2024 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (Trinity University Press, 2020), with Simmons Buntin and Elizabeth Dodd. 

A two-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award, his other honors include the Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Award in Nature Writing and the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee. He has received fellowships from Artist Trust, Spring Creek Project, Allied Arts, 4Culture, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and his work has been given a Special Mention in the 2016 Pushcart Prize anthology. 

Sheffield lives near Leavenworth, Washington, and is a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College and poetry editor of Terrain.org. In 2025, he was appointed the eighth poet laureate of Washington State through 2027.