Rick Barot

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines in 1969 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied at Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Barot is the author of five books of poetry: Moving the Bones (Milkweed Editions, 2024); The Galleons (Milkweed Editions, 2020), a finalist for the National Book Award; Chord (Sarabande Books, 2015), winner of the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; Want (Sarabande Books, 2008), winner of the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and The Darker Fall (Sarabande Books, 2002), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

Barot is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Stanford University, where he served as a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry.

The poetry editor of New England Review, Barot also teaches at Pacific Lutheran University, where he is the director of the low-residency MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop. In October 2025, he will serve as Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day. Barot lives in Tacoma.