Forrest Gander


Forrest Gander 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, 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. 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.
Be With, published in 2018 by New Directions, was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award. It is an elegiac collection of poetry and testament to his anguish over the death of his wife. Gander eventually decided to stop reading publicly from the collection so as not to "perform his grief."
The subjects of Gander's formally innovative essays range from snapping turtles to translation to literary hoaxes. His critical essays have appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, and The [New York Times Book Review].
In 2008, New Directions published As a Friend, Gander's novel of a gifted man, a land surveyor, whose impact on those around him provokes an atmosphere of intense self-examination and eroticism. In The New York Times Book Review, Jeanette Winterson praised As a Friend as "a strange and beautiful novel.... haunting and haunted." As a Friend has been published in translation in half a dozen foreign editions. In 2014, New Directions released Gander's second novel The Trace, about a couple who, researching the last journey of Civil War writer Ambrose Bierce, find themselves lost in the Chihuahua Desert. The New Yorker called it a "carefully crafted novel of intimacy and isolation." In The Paris Review, Robyn Creswell commented "Gander's landscapes are lyrical and precise, and his study of a marriage on the rocks is as empathetic as it is unsparing."
Gander is a translator who has edited several anthologies of poetry from Spain, Mexico, and Latin America. In addition, Gander has translated distinct volumes by Mexican poets Pura López Colomé, Coral Bracho, Valerie Mejer Caso, and Alfonso D'Aquino, another poet connected with ecopoetry. With Kyoko Yoshida, Gander translated Spectacle & Pigsty: Selected Poems of Kiwao Nomura, winner of the 2012 Best Translated Book Award; in 2016, New Directions published Alice Iris Red Horse, selected poems of Yoshimasu Gozo, edited by Gander. The second book of his translations, with Kent Johnson, of Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz, The Night, received a PEN Translation Award. Gander's critically acclaimed translations of the Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda are included in The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems.
In 2016, Copper Canyon Press released "Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda," a bilingual edition of Gander's translations of twenty previously unknown and unseen Neruda poems.
In 2018, Gander became a reviewer with New York Journal of Books.

Collaborations and editorial work

Gander has worked with artists Ann Hamilton and Gus Van Sant, photographers Lucas Foglia, Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, Peter Lindbergh, Michael Flomen, and Raymond Meeks, ceramics artists Ashwini Bhat and Richard Hirsch, dancers Eiko & Koma, painter Tjibbe Hooghiemstra, glass artist Michael Rogers, musicians Vic Chesnutt and Brady Earnhart, and others.
With CD Wright, Gander was a co-editor of Lost Roads Publishers for twenty years, soliciting, editing, and publishing books by more than thirty writers, including Michael Harper, Kamau Brathwaite, Arthur Sze, Fanny Howe, Steve Stern, Josie Foo, Frances Mayes, and Zuleyka Benitez.

Personal life

Gander was married to the poet CD Wright until her death in 2016, which precipitated Gander's book Be With. Together the couple raised a son, the artist Brecht Wright Gander.
Gander lives now in Northern California. He is married to the artist Ashwini Bhat.

Publications

Poetry collectionsMojave Ghost Knot Twice Alive Be With Eiko & Koma., Core Samples from the World., Eye Against Eye., The Blue Rock Collection., Torn Awake., Science & Steepleflower. Deeds of Utmost Kindness. Lynchburg. Rush to the Lake.
ChapbooksA Sonnet of Mudras with Ashwini Bhat. Eggplants and Lotus Root.,
NovelsThe Trace., As a Friend.
Collaborative worksAcross/Ground with photographer Lukas Felzmann. Past Continuous Tense with artist Lam Tung Pang. Knot with photographer Jack Shear. Redstart: An Ecological Poetics with poet John Kinsella. Las Canchas with photographer Daniel Borris. Twelve X 12:00 with artist Tjibbe Hooghiemstra. Sound of Summer Running with photographer Raymond Meeks.
Essay collectionsA Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory and Transcendence.
In translation
  • 魂与结》新封面. Chinese translation of Knot and "Mojave Ghost"..
  • Podwojone życie. Polish translation of Twice Alive..
  • 新生. Chinese translation of Twice Alive..
  • 相伴. Chinese translation of Be With..
  • Essere Con. Italian translation of Be With..
  • Bądź Blisko. Polish translation of Be With..
  • Poesie Scelte. Italian translation of poems from Be With..
  • Beckoned. Chinese translation of poems from Be With..
  • Estar Con. Spanish translation of Be With..
  • Está Con. Spanish translation of Be With..
  • Eiko & Koma. Japanese translation of Eiko & Koma..
  • İz. Turkish translation of The Trace..
  • Şairin Vedasi. Turkish translation of As a Friend..
  • El Rastro. Spanish translation of The Trace..
  • Le Trace. French translation of The Trace..
  • Eiko & Koma y otros poemas. Spanish translation of selected poems..
  • 裸. Chinese translation of Naked: Selected Poems..
  • Como Amigo. Spanish translation of As a Friend..
  • Ligaduras. A work of selected poems in Spanish translation..
  • Als es dich gab. Roman. German translation of As a Friend..
  • Libreto para eros. A work of selected poems in Spanish translation..
  • En Ami. French translation of As a Friend..
  • Като приятел. Bulgarian translation of As a Friend..
  • Arrancado del Sueño. Spanish translation of Torn Awake..
TranslationsEven Time Bleeds: Selected Poems by Jeannette Lozano Clariond Salitre by Alejandro Aguilar. Names & Rivers by Shuri Kido with Tomoyuki Endo. It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho. Dylan and the Whales by Maria Baranda, The New World Written: Selected Poems. The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik with Patricio Ferrari. Then Come Back : the Lost Neruda Poems, Alice Iris Red Horse: Selected Poems of Gozo Yoshimasu. Berlin: Stories by Aleš Šteger with Brian Henry & Aljaž Kovac.Rain of the Future: Poems by Valerie Mejer Caso edited by CD Wright. fungus skull eye wing: selected poems of Alfonso D'Aquino. Watchword, by Pura Lopez Colome. Spectacle & Pigsty: Selected Poems of Kiwao Nomura with Kyoko Yoshida. Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho. The Night: A Poem by Jaime Saenz with Kent Johnson., No Shelter: Selected Poems of Pura Lopez Colome. Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz with Kent Johnson.
Anthologies editedPinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America Selected by Raúl Zurita. Panic Cure: Poems from Spain for the 21st Century. Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico., Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women.,

Awards and honors

Archives

The Forrest Gander papers at Yale University's Beinecke Library cover Gander's full writing life, and additions to the collection are regularly made by the author.