BOBBY ELLIOTT

Bobby Elliott Poet Writer

Bobby Elliott's debut collection of poems, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on September 9, 2025. Raised in New York City, he earned his BA from Sarah Lawrence College and his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow and won the Kahn Prize for Teaching. Recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Cortland Review, Diode, North American Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. You can follow him on Instagram at @bobbyelliottpoet and pre-order The Same Man here.

How can I blame you

then or now

for clinging 

to your mother's

warmth, unceasing

light?

I respond to a deep impulse – probably the deepest one I know – to speak up, to return, to relive. This, to me, feels like the essential work of the heart.

April 20, 2025

April 13, 2025

April 27, 2025