Bobby Elliott

Bobby Elliott is an award-winning poet and teacher. His debut collection of poems, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2026 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, his writing has appeared in Adroit, BOMB, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and sons.

The Same Man

Poems

By Bobby Elliott

Winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Finalist for the 2026 Norma Farber First Book 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.