She grew up in
Pennsylvania, earned her
B.A. and M.T. (Master of Teaching) from the
University of Virginia, and attended the
Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. Szybist's
Incarnadine (
Graywolf Press, 2013) was the recipient of the 2013
National Book Award for Poetry, and her collection
Granted (
Alice James Books, 2003) won the 2003
Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books and the 2004 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. In a feature on NBCCA poetry finalists, the
Christian Science Monitor wrote: Szybist's poetry has appeared in
Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Tin House, and
The Kenyon Review, and
The Best American Poetry 2008. Szybist is an associate professor of English at
Lewis & Clark College in
Portland, Oregon, and a faculty member at the
Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She also has taught at
Kenyon College, the
University of Iowa, the Tennessee Governor’s School for Humanities, the University of Virginia’s Young Writers’ Workshop, and West High School in
Iowa City. ==Honors and awards==