Rick Barot has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and winner of the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize, and Chord (2015). Chord received the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. It was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2020.

His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, the Paris Review, New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, Tin House, Kenyon Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer.

Barot lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.