Mag Gabbert is an American poet and educator who lives in her hometown of Dallas, Texas, where she served as the city’s second Poet Laureate. She received her BA in English from Trinity University, where she was awarded a June Cook Scholarship for Creative Writing and graduated magna cum laude, with honors in English. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of California, Riverside. And she received her PhD in English, with a focus in creative writing, from Texas Tech University, where she was awarded the James. D. and Mary Hazlewood Memorial Graduate Fellowship and the Bruce G. and Cara Pollard Herlin Scholarship for Creative Writing.

Mag is the author of two forthcoming poetry collections: DESTRUCTION MYTH (Graywolf Press, fall 2027), and a collection for young readers titled Between You & Me: Poems for Readers of All Ages (Deep Vellum Books, spring 2028). Mag’s other books include SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, which was selected by Kathy Fagan as the winner of the Charles B. Wheeler Award from The Ohio State University and won the 2023 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award in Poetry; Spotted Ponies: The Collected Zines, a collection of poetry and art written in collaboration with Chen Chen, Tarfia Faizullah, Leila Chatti, Carly Joy Miller, and Taylor Dolan; The Breakup, which was selected by Kaveh Akbar as the winner of the Baltic Writing Residencies Chapbook Award in Poetry, and Minml Poems.

Mag’s work can also be found in Poetry Magazine, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Poets.org, and in over one-hundred additional journals, magazines, and anthologies. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a 92NY Discovery Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Idyllwild Arts, among others.

Mag currently teaches in the Department of Human-Centered Interdisciplinary Studies at Southern Methodist University. Her commitment to students was recognized in 2026 when she received the Annual Faculty Award from the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, a nation-wide organization with institutional members including Stanford, Wake Forest, Rice, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and many others.

Teaching Experience

Title	Institution	Courses Include	Dates
Clinical Assistant Professor	Southern Methodist University	The Art of Creativity & Expression; Research-Based Writing; Translations & Interpretations Across Art Forms	2022 – Present
Guest Faculty Lecturer	University of California at Riverside	Building with Tombstones: On Revival and Revision; Theory of Relativity: Poetry and Quantum Mechanics; The Four Horses of Poetry	2018, 2020, 2023, 2024
Adjunct Lecturer	Southern Methodist University	Introduction to Creative Writing; Creative Writing Across Genres; Poetry for Today: Reading and Writing within Changing Societies	2018 –2022
Graduate Part-Time Instructor	Texas Tech University	Introduction to Creative Writing; Introduction to Poetry; Essentials of College Rhetoric	2014 –2018
Faculty Instructor	Writing Workshops Dallas	Poetry for Beginners; Mixed-Levels Poetry; Mixed-Levels Personal Nonfiction	2017 - 2020

Selected Awards & Recognitions

• Winner of the 2026 Annual Faculty Award from the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs
• 2025 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow
• 2024-2026 Poet Laureate of Dallas, Texas
• Winner of the 2024 Writer’s League of Texas Book Award in Poetry
• Winner of a 2024 Pushcart Prize for the poem “Goat”
• Winner of the 2022 Baltic Writing Residencies Chapbook Award, selected by Kaveh Akbar
• Winner of the 2022 Action, Spectacle Poetry Prize, selected by Mary Jo Bang
• 2022 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Peter Taylor Fellow
• Winner of OSU/The Journal’s 2021 Charles B. Wheeler Prize in Poetry, selected by Kathy Fagan
• Winner of a 2021 92NY Discovery Award from the 92NY Unterberg Poetry Center
• 2020 Idyllwild Arts Poetry Fellow
• Winner of American Literary Review’s 2019 Rossetti Broadside Prize
• 2018 Poetry at Round Top Graduate Fellow