David Rigsbee was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Johns Hopkins University, Hollins College, and the University of Virginia. The most recent of his nine previous books is Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Southern Poetry (co-edited with Steven Ford Brown). His awards include fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, Virginia Commission on the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, and the Academy of American Poets. His work has appeared in such places as The New Yorker, Poetry, and American Poetry Review.

About The Dissolving Island:

"The Dissolving Island, a wonderful collection of new poems by David Rigsbee, is the work of a raconteur of the spirit, a splendid storyteller with just enough jaunty language to make you feel you’d want to hear almost anything he had to say. He is elegiac and disciplined, rapturous and suspicious, but more than anything else these are the sort of poems that James Wright once called “the poetry of a grown man.” I’d add the poems of a remarkable, felicitous intelligence."
—Dave Smith