Crystal Spring Gibbins grew up on Lake of the Woods, Minnesota/Ontario. She is the editor of Split Rock Review and the recipient of fellowships from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She lives on the south shore of Lake Superior.

Books by Crystal Spring Gibbins:

About Now/Here:

"Crystal Gibbins's poignant and quietly intense poems give lie to 'You can't go home again.' You can. It is changed, but you can go back. And we are changed, as readers, by these wildly articulate poems which speak like a woman, or a man, leaning towards you, across from you, with something urgent and true to say."
—Thomas Lux

"In her first full-length collection, Crystal Spring Gibbins celebrates 'this wide open they call the heartland,/this place in the middle,' yet the speaker in these poems is often standing on the edge of things: an island, a border, the banks of the Red River, the shores of her beloved Lake of the Woods, the fine line between memory and the here and now it has led her to. The poems dare to look into and beyond. They whisper and sing with a zen-like clarity that lives up to the author’s given name."
—Grace Bauer

"These are poems of places and spaces deeply felt and fully lived in. From pine cones to mayflies to pin feathers, from boats on the lake to birds in the Minnesota sky, from the cookstove to the silent meal table, Crystal Gibbins transports us into the extraordinary interiors of things and selves with an assured touch that surprises us at every turn with the wonder of the commonplace turned magical, mystical and almost mythical, where everything becomes part of one grand and multifaceted natural history museum. These poems both meditate and mediate, conducting us into little moments of personal delight and private grief while drawing us irrevocably nearer one another. In reminding us that in one way or another we all share transactions like these, Gibbins reminds us, too, of just how narrow and fragile is the line that divides ecstasy from nothingness, flood from fallow. A stunning collection!"
—Stephen Behrendt