Agradecimentos: We are grateful for the extraordinary contributions of our CTIO colleagues and the DES Camera, Commissioning, and Science Verification teams for achieving excellent instrument and telescope conditions that have made this work possible. The success of this project also relies critically on the expertise and dedication of the DES Data Management organization. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&MUniversity, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Collaborating Institutions in the DES. The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number AST-1138766. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MINECO under grants AYA2012-39559, ESP2013-48274, FPA2013-47986, and Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa SEV-2012-0234, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ci'encies de l’Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de F'isica d’Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig-Maximilians Universit¨at and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the University of Nottingham, the Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, and Texas A&M University. This work is based in part on observations obtained at the Gemini Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), the National Research Council (Canada), CONICYT (Chile), the Australian Research Council (Australia), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação (Brazil), and Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva (Argentina). The data were processed using the Gemini IRAF package v2.16. This research has made use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System. This manuscript has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics. TheUnited StatesGovernment retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes Abstract: We describe the observation and confirmation of nine new strong gravitational lenses discovered in Year 1 data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We created candidate lists based on (i) galaxy group and cluster samples, and (ii) photometrically selected galaxy samples. We selected 46 candidates through visual inspection and then used the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) at the Gemini South telescope to acquire a spectroscopic follow-up of 21 of these candidates. Through an analysis of these spectroscopic follow-up data, we confirmed nine new lensing systems and rejected two candidates, and the analysis was inconclusive on 10 candidates. For each of the confirmed systems, our report measured spectroscopic properties, estimated source image-lens separations, and estimated enclosed masses as well. The sources that we targeted have an i-band surface brightness range of i(SB) similar to 22-24 mag arcsec(-2) and a spectroscopic redshift range of z(spec) similar to 0.8-2.6. The lens galaxies have a photometric redshift range of z(lens) similar to 0.3-0.7. The lensing systems range in source image-lens separation from 2 to 9 arcsec and in enclosed mass from 10(12) to 10(13) M-circle dot FINANCIADORA DE ESTUDOS E PROJETOS - FINEP FUNDAÇÃO CARLOS CHAGAS FILHO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DO RIO DE JANEIRO - FAPERJ CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO - CNPQ Aberto