The People’s Poet

Meet Boulderite Andrea Gibson, Colorado’s new poet laureate

By Katherine Owen

Attend a concert—any venue, any genre—and you’ll find an audience composed of musicians and non-musicians alike. 

“But if you go to a poetry reading, usually everybody in the audience is a writer. And I want to change that about our culture.”

So says Andrea Gibson, Colorado’s newest poet laureate, whose work takes the form of both spoken word and printed page and focuses on everything from gender identity and social justice to love and wonder—all with vulnerability and honesty. “My partner teases me and says that there isn’t a topic I haven’t written on, saying, ‘You have something to say about everything.’ And it’s true,” Andrea quips.

Selected by Governor Jared Polis, Andrea began their two-year term in September 2023, succeeding poet Bobby Lefebre, the state’s first poet laureate of color. The author of six full-length collections of poetry, Andrea has won the Independent Publishers Award twice, was a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards three times and won the first-ever Women’s World Poetry Slam. Having shared their poems across the country and around the world, becoming Colorado’s poet laureate is a poignant homecoming. 

“I fell in love with poetry in Colorado, and just about everything I know and love about poetry, I learned from the poets of Colorado,” they explain. 

It all began with a broken heart and an open mic night at Boulder’s erstwhile Penny Lane coffee shop. “I got up on the mic, and I read a poem for the first time; I was so scared,” they recall. “The paper I was holding was rattling louder than my voice.” But they never fell out of love with it, because it always required courage and spurred a rare kind of “creative, emotional exchange.”

In time, Andrea went on to share those poems around the country and eventually, the world. Two years ago, one week after sending their most recent collection, You Better Be Lightning, off to print, Andrea was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and has been home undergoing treatment since. “So, it feels full circle—returning to the places where I fell in love with writing and fell in love with sharing poems,” they say.  

They explain that, for much of their life, their poetry focused on what was wrong in the world. With the diagnosis came a paradigm shift. “Suddenly, I’m in this place where I’m actively confronting my mortality,” they explain. Just as quickly, the focus of their work turned to the wonder and awe that’s all around us.  

“The diagnosis has changed my writing in that, so much of what I’m writing about is astonishment, which I now think is a huge part of every poet’s job in some way—to turn the culture’s attention towards astonishment, towards awe, and to just be present with the beauty that is here,” Andrea explains. “Right now, our world is in so much pain, but it’s so important to also put our attention on beauty. We will only want to save the world if we remember why it’s worth saving. And who wants to save a mess?” 

Andrea explains that awe is often found in a simple fact—a source of inspiration they’re excited to share with young people in particular as poet laureate. 

“I tell a 12-year-old that cows have best friends, or it rains diamonds on Jupiter, or that you can fit every person in the world inside of the city of Los Angeles. And then I say, ‘Okay, write on that for 10 minutes.’ And then in 10 minutes—I’m getting goosebumps—in 10 minutes, you’re watching these kids discover that they, too, are poets.”

From Andrea’s perspective, everybody is a poet and there is a poem for everybody. 

“I want people who don’t necessarily love writing to know that there is a poem for them. There’s a genre of poetry for everyone, or there’s a poet that, even if you think you hate poetry, there is a poet for you,” Andrea says. “I want people to just get excited about life and feeling and the connective power of art because it wakes us up emotionally and helps us reframe things. The first thing that I wrote about cancer was just this:

The chemo has begun 

taking my eyelashes. 

As the average person 

has 400 eyelashes 

that’s 400 wishes I wouldn’t

have made otherwise.

What I’ve found in my experience as a poet is that the poet’s job is to make even the hardest things in life beautiful.” 

Learn more about Andrea at andreagibson.org or sign up for their newsletter, Things That Don’t Suck.