Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander (born January 21, 1956) is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for ''Be With'' and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Early life

Born in Barstow, California, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia, where he and his two sisters were raised by their single mother, Ruth Clare Cockerille, an elementary school teacher. The four shared a two-room apartment in Annandale. Gander's estranged father ran the Mod Scene, a bar on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, New York City. With his mother and sisters, Gander began to travel extensively on summer road trips around the United States. The traveling, which never stopped, came to inform his interest in landscapes, languages, and cultures. Forrest and his two sisters were adopted by Walter J. Gander soon after his marriage to their mother. Gander earned a B.S. in geology from the College of William and Mary. After graduation, he had taken up a job in Washington DC, and had been considering a doctoral degree in paleontology when he was diagnosed with stage-three melanoma.

As he started to recover from melanoma, he decided to apply for MFA programs. He graduated with an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University. There he met his first wife, C. D. Wright, with whom he relocated to Mexico for a number of years before returning and settling on the East Coast.

Career

A writer of multiple genres, Gander is noted for his many collaborations with other artists, including Eiko & Koma. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. In 2017, he was elected as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets and in 2019, he was awarded The Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

He taught at Providence College from 1988 to 2000, with visiting professorships to the Iowa Writer's Workshop and Brown University in between. He also taught at Harvard University before becoming the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literatures at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. At Brown, he led poetry and translation workshops, invited and hosted visiting writers and filmmakers, and taught seminars dedicated to eco-poetics, poetry in translation (with an emphasis on Latin America, and sometimes Asia), and to fellow poets such as the late Robert Creeley.

Writing and translation

David Kirby, writing in ''The New York Times Book Review'' notes that, "It isn't long before the ethereal quality of these poems begins to remind you of similar effects in the work of T. S. Eliot and the 17th century Anglo-Welsh mystic Henry Vaughan....In the midst of such questioning, the only reality is the poet's unflinchingly curious mind." Noting the frequency and particularity of Gander's references to ecology and landscape, Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet Laureate, calls him "a Southern poet of a relatively rare kind, a restlessly experimental writer." Gander's book ''Core Samples from the World'' was a finalist for 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award

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