As if it were a jump shot from their basketball-obsessed childhood, “soaring towards the rim like a kite,” Andrea Gibson could send a spoken word poem spinning through space and time knowing it would reach its perfect home — swishing to a close in the last lines, nothing but net.
The poem “How I Became a Poet” dwells for nearly five minutes on Gibson’s youth — “the tiniest kid in my class/hair cut so strange I looked like a third-grade boy/who gets picked on by his first-grade brother.”
The future poet only emerges at the end, when Gibson’s talent on a Maine state championship basketball team opens the door to college: “And because I knew I wasn’t allowed/to spend four years studying only my jump shot,/I said, ‘I guess I’ll learn/to write some poems/while I’m here.’ ”
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Andrea Gibson, a spoken word artist who used they/them pronouns and wrote poetry that explored and illuminated life’s rich ambiguities, was 49 when they died Monday at home in Boulder, Colo.
Their wife, Megan Falley, announced the death in a post, cowritten for Instagram, that began by quoting Gibson: “Whenever I leave this world, whether its in 60 years from now, I wouldn’t want anyone to say I lost some battle. I’ll be a winner that day.”
Since being diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer in 2021, Gibson focused some of their work on how accepting mortality enriches life.
“The funniest thing through this time is that folks will interact with me as if I’m going through something that they’re not going through,” they said in a video posted online in April 2024. “And so I’ve shared so much about this experience not because I want people to know that I am mortal, but because I really want people to know that they are.”
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Gibson, who was Colorado’s current poet laureate, said that in facing death, “you tap into the brevity of something and all of a sudden everything becomes more special,” and added that “there is so much more time in a moment than there is in a decade.”
“Come See Me in the Good Light,” a documentary that won the Festival Favorite Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and which will be streamed on Apple TV+, features Gibson and Falley and their loving relationship, particularly since the cancer diagnosis.
“Andrea was truly a rock star poet,” comedian and writer Tig Notaro, a longtime friend who is an executive producer on the documentary, wrote on Instagram. “So many of Andrea’s words have quietly guided me through life’s twists and turns — I will forever be so grateful.”
Gibson published several books, including “How Poetry Can Change Your Heart,” cowritten with Falley. A four-time Denver Grand Slam Champion, they had twice placed third in the Individual World Poetry Slam, and, in 2008, they were the first winner of the Women of the World Poetry Slam.
“Renowned for thought-provoking poetry, advocacy for arts in education, and a unique ability to connect with the vast and diverse poetry lovers of Colorado, Andrea was truly one of a kind and will be deeply missed,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis posted Monday on Facebook.
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When Polis announced the poet laureate appointment in September 2023, he said “Andrea’s voice holds a fierce conviction in inspiring others to pursue art and take action toward solving social issues.”
In a 2017 essay for Out magazine, Gibson wrote about having struggled with the language of identity.
“For a while I reluctantly claimed bisexual. Then gay. Some years later I was proudly calling myself a dyke," they wrote. “But when queer found its way to me I threw myself a pride parade, and when I learned the word genderqueer it felt like hearing someone say my name right for the first time in my life.”
Born in 1975, “I was from Calais, Maine/spelled like Calais, France/said like the rough patches on all the millworkers’ hands,” Gibson wrote in “How I Became a Poet.”
Basketball success led to attending St. Joseph’s College in Standish, Maine.
“The first time I came out I was 20 years old, studying creative writing at a very Catholic college,” they wrote in the Out essay. “When I say very I mean many of my teachers were monks and nuns and I was playing college basketball for — no joke — The Lady Monks.”
The college went on to make “some huge strides,” wrote Gibson, who was invited back to the campus a few months after the 2016 shootings at the Pulse LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Fla., “to share all of my queerest poems with students and staff — monks and nuns included.”
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Gibson’s unflinching poetry addressed rape, the mistreatment of children, and numerous flashpoint issues. “It’s a political art form. You’re trying to write to change minds and hearts,” Gibson told the Globe in 2019.
Nevertheless, “I remind myself of that night whenever the political climate of our world is breaking my heart,” Gibson wrote in Out of returning to read at St. Joseph’s. “It’s important to notice when things change for the better. It’s crucial to our spirits, imperative to the longevity of our activism, and is essential in our own becoming. I never want to stop becoming.”
In one poem Gibson wrote: “A difficult life is not less/worth living than a gentle one./Joy is simply easier to carry/than sorrow.”
Moving to Colorado in the late 1990s, Gibson was immediately notable in what Notaro described as the state’s community of activists, artists, and comedians.
Seeing Gibson perform one night, “I witnessed the pure essence of an old-school GENUINE rock star,” Notaro wrote on Instagram.
“I couldn’t believe the roller coaster of emotion,” Notaro wrote. “When Andrea stepped on stage, everyone stepped onto that ride with an audience of strangers, holding onto each other for dear life, each person taken aback by their own deep sobs of reflective tears, and then immediately into deep healing laughter.”
According to Gibson’s Instagram account, they died at 4:16 a.m. Monday “surrounded by their wife, Meg, four ex-girlfriends, their mother and father, dozens of friends, and their three beloved dogs.”
In addition to Gibson’s wife and parents, survivors include a sister, Laura, whom Gibson wrote and spoke about. A complete list of survivors and plans for memorial gatherings were not immediately available.
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One of the most emotional of Gibson’s readings was during an interview this year for NBC Chicago’s “It’s OK to Ask Questions” show. At the end, Gibson and Falley sat on the grass facing each other as Gibson read from the poem “Love Letter From the Afterlife,” which begins:
My love, I was so wrong.
Dying is the opposite of leaving.
When I left my body, I did not go away.
That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here.
I am more here than I ever was before.
I am more with you than I ever could have imagined.
“I think that the artist’s primary job is to tell the truth, but I think that there is an additional job, which is to create hope, to inspire awe,” Gibson said in the April 2024 video. “I think the poet’s job is to remind us that we were born astonished. I have since learned that we are never, ever supposed to grow out of that.”
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary used an incorrect pronoun for Andrea Gibson in one reference. The Globe regrets the error.
Bryan Marquard can be reached at [email protected].