Introduction
Alex Dimitrov (born November 30, 1984) is an American poet living in New York City.
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.
In June of 2012 he published American Boys, an online chapbook from Floating Wolf Quarterly. His first book of poems, Begging for It, was published by Four Way Books in March of 2013. His second book of poems, Together and by Ourselves, was published by Copper Canyon Press in April of 2017.
Dimitrov will publish his third book, Love and Other Poems, in February of 2021. The title poem, "Love," was published in the American Poetry Review in their January/February 2020 issue, which featured Dimitrov on the cover.
Dimitrov's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Slate,Tin House, Boston Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and other publications.
Dimitrov has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, Barnard College, Sarah Lawrence College, Rutgers University in New Brunswick, Marymount Manhattan College, and Bennington College.
He worked at the Academy of American Poetsfor eight years, where he was the Senior Content Editor and edited the popular online series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine.
In February of 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.
On November 26, 2016, with the poet Dorothea Lasky, Dimitrov founded Astro Poets. Flatiron Books published their book, Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac in October of 2019.
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.