Alex Dimitrov

Early life

Dimitrov is a first-generation immigrant, born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and raised in Detroit, Michigan. His parents fled a Communist Bulgaria shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied with the poet Anne Carson, and received a BA in English and Film Studies in 2007. In 2009 he received an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, where he studied with the poet Marie Howe.

Career

Dimitrov is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. His first full-length book of poems is Begging for It, published by Four Way Books in March 2013, and he is also the author of American Boys, an online chapbook published by Floating Wolf Quarterly in June 2012, which included poems, childhood photographs, and digital ephemera such as screencaps of text messages and other images from modern methods of communication and connection.

His second book of poems, Together and by Ourselves, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017.

Dimitrov's poems have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review,American Poetry Review, Slate, Tin House, Boston Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and other publications.

He is the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edits the popular online series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine, and has taught creative writing at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, Marymount Manhattan College, and Bennington College.

In February 2014 Dimitrov launched Night Call, a multimedia poetry project through which he read poems to strangers in person and online. Some of the components of the project included a video and a poem both titled Night Call.

Wilde Boys

On May 27, 2009, days after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, Dimitrov founded Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon that brought together emerging and established poets and writers in New York City.

Since then, Dimitrov has hosted the following writers: John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Henri Cole, CAConrad, Michael Cunningham, Mark Doty, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Richard Howard, Marie Howe, Wayne Koestenbaum, Dorothea Lasky, Timothy Liu, Daniel Mendelsohn, Eileen Myles, Carl Phillips, Brenda Shaughnessy, David Trinidad, and Edmund White. Public readings for the salon have included poets Mark Bibbins, Tom Healy, Saeed Jones, Paul Legault, Dante Michaeux, Angelo Nikolopoulos, Jason Schneiderman, and Mark Wunderlich.

Dimitrov has also held salons focusing on recovering the work of queer poets Joe Brainard, Tim Dlugos, Leland Hickman and Reginald Shepherd. A salon was also held in honor of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, with special guests Richard Howard and Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

Wilde Boys ended on November 1, 2013.