Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled bakla poet and playwright. He is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025) and the verse drama My Love is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). His work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Poets.org, New England Review, and Gulf Coast, among others, and has received support from Fulbright, Lambda Literary, Sewanee, Millay, and Kenyon Review.
He serves as a reader for POETRY Magazine and managing poetry editor for Foglifter Journal. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta and poet-in-residence at Tangled Art + Disability, he received an M.F.A. in poetry and critical disability studies from the New Writers Project at UT Austin.
At MacDowell, Colgate completed a draft of his poetry collection Hardly Creatures and finished revisions on his verse drama My Love is Water. The collection engages visual arts accessibility practices to explore modes of intimacy; the drama takes place at a house party of Filipina nurses.
Portrait by Felicia Byron
