Alex Dimitrov

“Poetry is what you speak into eternity. It has little to do with capitalism or social media or what’s popular.”

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“[Love and Other Poems] practically embodies the phrase ‘breath of fresh air.’… It fizzes like a just-opened bottle of soda. It sprints like the Beatles running through a train station. It talks a mile a minute like a person swept away in the druggy lunacy of a serious crush… Love and Other Poems has felt like a long-awaited remedy.”

— The New York Times

“Joyous and captivating… Meditations on humanity’s search for meaning are handled with wit and vulnerability… In this affecting collection, his most fully achieved thus far, Dimitrov provides the reader with a needed celebration of pleasures.”

— Publisher's Weekly starred review

“Truth-telling, raw, fierce with feeling.”

— Brenda Shaughnessy on Together and By Ourselves

“This is an exhilarating, memorable book. The poems are savage and ferocious...they are sophisticated about everything that has happened in poetry, and extend it. I loved this book.”

— Frank Bidart on Begging for It

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), which Publisher’s Weekly called, “joyous and captivating” in a starred review. His other books include Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013) and the chapbook American Boys. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Paris Review, and Poetry. Dimitrov also founded the queer poetry salon Wilde Boys (2009-13), which brought together emerging and established writers in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Previously, he was the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the popular series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. On Twitter he writes an endless poem called “Love” in real time, one tweet a day. With Dorothea Lasky he co-founded Astro Poets and is the co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac.

In an interview with Columbia Journal, Dimitrov was asked about his second book and the desire to “not write the same book twice.” “I’m not here to write what’s expected of me, which is probably, oh I don’t know, a gay male Eastern European immigrant narrative? I’m sure capitalism would love for me to sell that,” he responded, “But I’m here to be in service to my imagination, not the space capitalism will reward me for as it absorbs every critique of itself while doing so.”

He has taught writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions.He was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and lives in New York, where he’s working on a novel.

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