Forrest Gander

Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet
Novelist, Essayist & Translator

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • The Ethics of Translation
  • Ecological Poetics
  • Border Crossings & Transnational Writing
  • An Evening with Forrest Gander

Biography

“The quiet complexity of his syntax can build striking abstract landscapes in which the material and spiritual worlds seem equally intelligent.” –Tony Hoagland

Gander’s [poems] plunge and swoop up and down the whole scale of earthy, earthly, cerebral, and celestial experience. The ride is for the most part thrilling.” —The Boston Book Review

“In the same way that the vocabulary of faith might aid a religious poet in a time of crisis, Gander’s deep affinity for the natural world provides a kind of solace.” —The New Yorker

Pulitzer Prize-winning Forrest Gander is a poet, writer, translator, and editor of several anthologies of writing from Spain and Mexico. He is celebrated for the richness of his language and his undaunted lyric passion. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including collaborations with notable artists and photographers. Most recently, Gander collaborated with the photographer Jack Shear to create the collection Knot (Copper Canyon, 2022). Within Knot are twenty-three lush black and white photographs of a body and cloth performing a provocative ballet, a wrestling match, a tense sequence of appearances and disappearances that immediately take on symbolic weight. The images correspond with Gander’s lyric response. The result is a profound dialogue between word and image, observation and inspiration, imagination and intellect. “What do you see?” one poem asks. “A divinity wrung from a black cloud.”

His poetry collection, Twice Alive (2021), addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Gander’s collection Be With (2018) won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award. The Pulitzer Prize Judges citation calls it, “A collection of elegies that grapple with sudden loss, and the difficulties of expressing grief and yearning for the departed.” The New Yorker reflects on this book: “Be With is a blurted command welling up from yearnings not quite expressible in language.” Be With was published after the passing of Gander’s partner of more than thirty years, the poet C. D. Wright.

Concerned with the way we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign, his wide-ranging poetry volume Core Samples from the World (2011)—a collaboration studded with the work of three great photographers, Graciela Iturbide, Raymond Meeks, and Lucas Foglia—was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ganders other collections include Eye Against Eye, with photographs by Sally Mann; Torn Awake; and Science & Steepleflower.

He is the author of the essay collection Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory & Transcendence. Other essays have appeared in The Nation, The Boston Review, the New York Times Book Review, and more. Gander’s two novels are the gemlike debut As A Friend (2008) and The Trace (2014). In As A Friend, he explores the valences of friendship: eroticism, jealousy, emulation, compassion, betrayal, and loyalty. Jeanette Winterson, in her New York Times review, wrote “In this strange and beautiful novel as in life, love is part of what is sacred. Through love we get a chance to see past our own boundaries — not only into the life of another, but to the edge of life too: the last step off the seeming-solid into the weightlessness of death, its free form.” The Trace is a poetic novel about a couple journeying through Mexico, recovering from a world shattered when the car breaks down in the middle of the Chihuahua Desert. Jason Diamond calls the novel a “gorgeous portrait of what some people will do to come to grips with tragedy.”

A translator of international renown, Gander’s translations include It Must Be a Misunderstanding; Names And Rivers; Alice, Iris, Red Horse: Selected Poems of Gozo YoshimasuThen Come Back: The Lost Poems of Pablo NerudaFungus Skull Eye Wing: Selected Poems of Alfonso D’Aquino which was longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America (with Raúl Zurita); Watchword, the Villaurrutia Award-winning book by Mexican Poet Laureate Pura Lopez Colome; Spectacle & Pigsty (with Kyoko Yoshida), selected poems by contemporary Japanese poet Kiwao Nomura, which won the Best Translated Book Award for 2012; Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho, which was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize; and (with Kent Johnson) The Night by Jaime Saenz.

In 2008, Gander was named a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow, one of 50 artists to be recognized for artistic excellence, unique artistic vision, and significant contributions to their fields. Gander is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting, and United States Artists Foundations. He has been a Library of Congress/Witter Bynner fellow and a finalist for the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle awards. He is a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and an elected member of The Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Gander was a Briggs-Copeland Poet at Harvard University before becoming the A.K. Seaver Professor of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University where he taught for more than twenty years. He lives and works now in Northern California.

Short Bio

Forrest Gander is a writer, translator, and editor of several anthologies of writing from Spain and Mexico. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Twice AliveBe With, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; and Core Samples from the World, a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Most recently, Gander collaborated with the photographer Jack Shear to create the collection Knot (Copper Canyon, 2022). His other books include two novels, As A Friend and The Trace; the poetry collections Be WithEye Against EyeTorn AwakeScience & Steepleflower; and the essay collection Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory & Transcendence. Gander’s essays have appeared in The Nation, The Boston Review, and the New York Times Book Review. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, Howard, United States Artists, and Whiting Foundations.

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