D. A. Powell

• Name — D. A. Powell • Birth Name — Douglas A. Powell • Born — 16 May 1963 • Birthplace — Albany, Georgia, U.S. • Occupation — Poet • Education — Lindhurst High School Sonoma State University Iowa Writers' Workshop • Awards — Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards (2010) Douglas A. Powell (born May 16, 1963) is an American poet.

Powell lived in various places growing up, then graduated high school from Lindhurst High School in Olivehurst, California. He then worked in a number of jobs before eventually settling in Santa Rosa, California, where he attended Sonoma State University. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1991 and a master's in 1993. Not long after completing his graduate work at Sonoma State, he entered the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. In 1996, he graduated from Iowa and began a career as a poet and university professor. Powell has taught at a number of different universities, including Columbia University, Sonoma State University, San Francisco State University, and Harvard University, where he served as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry. In 2004, Powell left Harvard for the University of San Francisco, where he teaches in the English department.

Considered by some an experimental poet, Powell mixes both conventional and non-conventional techniques. For example, his early poems do not have titles; the first lines serve as the poems' working titles. He also does not capitalize the first letter of a new sentence; in this sense, he is reminiscent of E. E. Cummings. His work often moves back and forth between popular culture like movies and music and more complicated themes like religion and AIDS; he uses numerous rhetorical devices, especially puns, as bridges between these two spheres of experience. Powell's first three books of poems are considered a kind of trilogy on the AIDS epidemic. Writing in The New York Times, critic Stephanie Burt said of Powell's work, "No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible."

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