Bobby Elliott

Bobby Elliott‘s debut collection of poems, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on September 9, 2025. Raised in New York City, he earned his BA from Sarah Lawrence College and his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow and won the Kahn Prize for Teaching. Recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Cortland Review, Diode, North American Review, ONLY POEMS, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.

The Same Man

Poems

By Bobby Elliott

Winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

A one-of-a-kind debut that asks what we owe those we love, The Same Man is an aching chronicle of the early days of parenthood and the wounds of the past. Haunted by memory and powered by the demands and joys of new life, Elliott’s poems wrestle with the father-son relationship at their core and the deep, unspoken harms that shape us. A relentless effort toward expression and autonomy, The Same Man is a reckoning and a balm, a rallying call and a father’s song of devotion.