About Derek Sheffield

Short Bio

The Washington State Poet Laureate and a 2026 Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, Derek Sheffield is also the voice of Gouverneur Morris in the Netflix documentary, The American Experiment, produced by Tom Hanks. His books include Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, winner of a 2024 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. A two-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award, his other awards include the Foreword Reviews Indies Book of the Year in Nature Writing and the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee. He teaches at Wenatchee Valley College, edits poetry for Terrain.org, and can often be found in the woods along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range near Leavenworth, Washington.

Long Bio

The Washington State Poet Laureate and a 2026 Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, Derek Sheffield is also the voice of Gouverneur Morris in the Netflix documentary, The American Experiment, produced by Tom Hanks. His collection Not for Luck was selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. His other books include Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award and finalist for the Washington State Book Award, A Revised Account of the West, winner of the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award judged by Debra Marquart, and A Mouthpiece of Thumbs (Blue Begonia Press). He is a co-editor, with Simmons Buntin and Elizabeth Dodd, of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, and a co-creator, with Elizabeth Bradfield and CMarie Fuhrman, of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry.

He is the recipient of the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee, a 2024 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Foreword Reviews Indies Book of the Year in Nature Writing, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Artist Trust, the Spring Creek Project, Allied Arts, 4Culture, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and a Special Mention in the 2016 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Vijay Seshadri chose his poem as the sole finalist for the 2018 Lynda Hull Memorial Award and he was a finalist for the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize judged by Jacqueline Johnson.

His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including The Southern Review, Poetry, Orion, The Georgia Review, AGNI, The Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, Rattle, Alaska Quarterly Review, Hampden Sydney Poetry Review, High Country News, The North American Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Anglers Journal, The Flyfish Journal, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily. They have also been featured on National Public Radio and appeared in many anthologies, including The Nature of Our Times, Rocky Mountains Literary Field Guide, The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss, and Connection, The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace & Renewal, Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them, On Resilience: Stories of Climate Adaptation Across Washington’s Landscapes, New Poets of the American West, The Ecopoetry Anthology, Nature and Environmental Writing: A Guide and Anthology, A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford, The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins, and River of Memory: The Everlasting Columbia.

Derek was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up there and in Gig Harbor, Washington. The first in his family to attend college, he now lives on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range near Leavenworth, Washington, where he can often be found in the woods or along Icicle Creek. His two daughters have come to know many of the beings of their bioregion and can often be found making their own poems and paintings. You can find some of their work in Rattle and Jeopardy. 

He is the poetry editor of Terrain.org.

Teaching and Presenting

Derek is a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College, where he serves as co-chair of the Sustainability Committee with geographer Dr. Joan Qazi, and with biologist Dr. Dan Stephens, teaches Northwest Nature Writing, a learning community that blends the study of field ecology with writing. He has won the WVC Excellence in Teaching Award a record five times and has given the commencement address at the request of the students in 2005, 2020, and 2026. In 2016, by a vote of his colleagues, he won the Linda Schultz Herzog Faculty Member of the Year Award. His students have gone on to earn MFA degrees from the University of Washington, Pacific University, University of Idaho, Institute of American Indian Arts, Eastern Washington University, Bennington, Rainier Writing Program, and Goddard. He has also taught for organizations such as Orion Magazine and Writing the Wild with Krissy Kludt and J. Drew Lanham.

He has given many presentations and lectures, including The Wallace Stegner Lecture, The Huntingford Humanities Lecture, the keynote address for the Leavenworth Spring Bird Fest, and a talk on Washington identities for the Washington State Historical Society as part of the America250 program. He has also presented and taught at many conferences and universities, including the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center, AWP, ASLE, WLA, CCHA, Cascadia Poetry Festival, Skagit River Poetry Festival, Get Lit!, LitFuse, Fishtrap, Orcas Island Lit Fest, Beargrass Writing Retreat, Sowell Collection Conference, Gonzaga University, Southern Utah University, and the University of Washington. He has been a visiting faculty member of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts low-residency MFA program and of the English Department at Central Washington University. In cooperation with Humanities Washington and the Great Books Foundation, he has worked with veterans in Central Washington through discussion groups focused on the literature of war.