Andrea Gibson, a master of spoken-word poetry who cultivated legions of admirers with intensely personal, often political works exploring gender, love and a personal four-year fight with terminal ovarian cancer, died on Monday in Longmont, Colo. Gibson, who used the pronouns they and them and did not use an honorific, was 49.
Megan Falley, their wife, confirmed the death.
Gibson was among the leading voices in a resurgence of spoken-word, or slam, poetry in the mid-2000s, centered in cafes and on college campuses around the country.
They were prolific, publishing seven books, mostly poetry, along with seven albums, all while touring tirelessly. In 2023, Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado named Gibson the state’s poet laureate.
Gibson performed shows as long as 90 minutes, even with chronic stage fright — a condition addressed in the poem “Ode to the Public Panic Attack,” a work that typified Gibson’s sardonic yet vulnerably honest approach. The poem, addressed to a panic attack, begins:
You find me at the coffee shop,
at the movies,
buying comfort food in the grocery store.
Then, after a long list of the many other banal situations in which the panic finds Gibson, the poem concludes:
To step towards the terror.
Its promised jaw.
To scrape your boots on the welcome mat.
To tell yourself fear
Is the seat of fearlessness.
Even when you’re falling through the ice that is never
Been weakness. That is the bravest thing I have ever done in my life.
Earlier this year, Gibson appeared in the documentary “Come See Me in the Good Light,” directed by Ryan White, which focused on Gibson and Ms. Falley during Gibson’s long struggle with cancer. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and won the Festival Favorite Award.
Gibson’s poems were always emotionally freighted, whether they were fiercely political statements or achingly painful odes to lost love that left audiences in tears.
“Poetry and art in general can be this amazing connective tool,” Gibson told Westword, an alternative weekly magazine in Denver, in 2023. “It engenders empathy. And sometimes I can forget this, but adding beauty to the world is a thing unto itself. We were born astonished. We should never grow out of our astonishment.”
Andrea Faye Gibson was born on Aug. 13, 1975, in Calais, Maine, a working-class town on the state’s eastern border with Canada. Their father, Mark, worked for the post office, and their mother, Shirley (Doliber) Gibson, was a secretary at a technical college.
Gibson grew up in an intensely religious, socially conservative world — their parents are observant Baptists, and Gibson attended St. Joseph’s College of Maine, the only Roman Catholic institution of higher education in the state.
Gibson played basketball on a scholarship; the team, the Lady Monks, won the state championship during Gibson’s senior year.
All the while, Gibson was developing their own gender and sexual identity, mostly in secret.
“I had a solid idea of what I would lose if I came out and I knew it would be excruciating, but not more excruciating than losing myself,” Gibson wrote in Out magazine in 2017. “So after a long time of mastering how to leave the pronouns out of all my love poems — I finally started telling people about the softness of my love’s face.”
Gibson graduated with a degree in English in 1997. After a stint working for a landscape company in New Orleans, they moved to Boulder, Colo.
One day, after a particularly difficult breakup, Gibson saw an ad for an upcoming spoken-word night in Denver and decided to go.
“It was the first time I’d ever seen a poem turn a room electric,” Gibson told The Independent, a student newspaper at the University of Colorado, in 2013. “I remember being covered in goose bumps. There was just something magical about the energy of the person performing and the connection between the audience and the performer.”
Gibson returned a few nights later with a poem of their own. With hands shaking, they took the stage to read. The audience cheered. Gibson was hooked.
They quickly fell into the growing spoken-word scene around Denver, and eventually joined the city’s competitive slam poetry team.
Along with their wife and parents, Gibson is survived by a sister, Laura Gibson.
Gibson received a diagnosis of ovarian cancer in 2021 and began chemotherapy — a treatment they spoke openly about in interviews, onstage and in their poetry.
In the 2023 poem “In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down,” Gibson wrote:
Jenny says when people ask if she’s out of the woods,
she tells them she’ll never be out of the woods,
says there is something lovely about the woods.
I know how to build a survival shelter
from fallen tree branches, packed mud,
and pulled moss. I could survive forever
on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me
to stop measuring my life span by length,
but by width?
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
The post Andrea Gibson, a Poet of Love, Hope and Gender Identity, Dies at 49 appeared first on New York Times.
