Forrest Gander
| Forrest Gander | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 1956 Barstow, California |
| Occupation | Brown University |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Notable awards | Whiting Awards, Guggenheim Fellowship |
Forrest Gander (born 1956) is an American poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and translator.
Born in the Mojave Desert as James Forrest Cockerille III, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia where he and his two sisters were raised by their single mother, 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 St. in Greenwich Village, NY. Because his father refused to pay child support, Gander's early life was financially stressful. 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. In 1972, Forrest and his two sisters, Karin and Lisa, were adopted by Walter J. Gander in Annandale, Virginia soon after Walter Gander's marriage to their mother, the former Ruth Clare Cockerille. Gander earned college degrees in geology, a subject referenced frequently in both his poems and essays, and in English literature. His work has been linked to ecopoetics and ecology. A writer in multiple genres, Gander is noted for his many collaborations with other artists. 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.
Currently, he is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literatures at Brown University in Rhode Island.
His poetry is lyrical, but often complex rhythmically and structurally. 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. The Pulitzer citation notes that Core Samples from the World is "A compelling work that explores cross-cultural tensions in the world and digs deeply to identify what is essential in human experience." With Australian poet-activist John Kinsella, Gander wrote the cross-genre book Redstart: an Ecological Poetics.
...
Wikipedia