Doren Robbins

For interviews and selections from books and art go to: dorenrobbins.wordpress.com

Originally from Los Angeles, Doren Robbins is a poet and mixed media artist from Santa Cruz, California. After twenty-something years traveling, raising a family, working as a cook and as a carpenter, Robbins started teaching a variety of creative writing and literature courses through an extended personal and moral interpretation of Kenneth Burke’s idea of “literature as equipment for living,” incorporating dreaming as found cinema, fantasy as deliberate reasoning, and political reasoning through the ethics of developing a non-exploitative society. Through his inter-active workshop teaching style he has inspired many students to become English teachers, writers, and teachers of creative writing.

Robbins’ work has appeared in over one hundred-fifty publications, including Kayak, Sulfur, The American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, 5 AM, Hotel Amerika, The Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Angry Old Man, Otoliths, Empty Mirror, Another Chicago Magazine, and Nimrod. Past collections of his poetry, Driving Face Down and My Piece of the Puzzle were awarded the Blue Lynx Poetry Award 2001 and the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award, respectively. Robbins is also the author of a collection of monologues, short fiction and prose poetry, Parking Lot Mood Swing. His book Twin Extra: A Poem In Three Parts from Wild Ocean Press (nominated for the Jewish National Book Council Award in Poetry).

In 2020 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Apocalypse Contemporary, a book-length essay on Sharon Doubiago’s book of poems Naked to the Earth; highmoonoon books published Not Fade Away: Poetic Prose Monologues, Three Sequences.

As a poet and an artist Robbins organized readings and produced posters to benefit The Romero Relief Fund and The Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund during the Salvadoran Civil War, and for poetsagainst-thewar.com during the ongoing American-Iraq-Afghanistan Wars. His writing has been awarded fellowships and grants from Oregon Literary Arts, The Loft Foundation, The Chester H. Jones Foundation, The Judah Magnes Museum, The Indiana Review, and a few other inoffensive organizations and readable periodicals. Since 2001, he has taught literature, composition and creative writing at Foothill College.