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Andrea Gibson, a Poet of Love, Hope and Gender Identity, Dies at 49

Arts|Andrea Gibson, a Poet of Love, Hope and Gender Identity, Dies at 49

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/arts/andrea-gibson-dead.html

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A master of spoken-word performance, Gibson insisted that poetry, especially when read aloud to an audience, was a political act.

A close-up portrait of Andrea Gibson with their hands in the air.

July 15, 2025, 6:23 p.m. ET

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.