Forrest Gander

A writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, Forrest Gander was born in California’s Mojave Desert and grew up in Virginia. He earned a degree in geology from the College of William & Mary and an MA in literature from San Francisco State University.

He taught at Harvard University and then Brown University, where he was the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature. He’s the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, a Best Translated Book Award, The Whiting Award, two Gertrude Stein Awards for innovative North American writing, and other awards, as well as fellowships from the Library of Congress, Guggenheim, and United States Artists foundations.

His books, often concerned with ecology and intimacy, include Mojave Ghost (New Directions, 2024), Twice Alive (New Directions, 2021), Be With (New Directions, 2018), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and the desert novel The Trace (New Directions, 2015), among others. Gander’s many translations include Alice Iris Red Horse: Selected Poems of Yoshimasu Gozo (New Directions, 2016) and Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Gander has often collaborated with artists such as Ann Hamilton, Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, and Eiko & Koma.

His essay collection, A Faithful Existence (Counterpoint, 2005), considers translation and the relation between science and literature. His collaborative book with Australian poet and activist John Kinsella, Redstart: An Ecological Poetics (University of Iowa Press, 2012), is frequently cited by scholars and writers in reference to ecopoetics.

Critic BK Fischer wrote in the Boston Review that Gander’s poetry “marshals a sinewy and strenuous language for familial, sensory, and erotic experience.” A master of the long poem, Gander uses the form to consider his subjects from a variety of approaches, and as the proving ground for unique formal constraints. Of Be With, Gander’s series of elegies for his wife, the poet C.D. Wright, Dan Chiasson noted in the New Yorker: “The book’s sputtering, flinching style, with its syntactical dead ends and missed connections, feels like both an accommodation to the necessity of language and proof of its inadequacy.”

He won the Best Translated Book Award and has translated collections by Mexican poets Pura López-Colomé and Coral Bracho. With Kent Johnson he translated Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz’s The Night (Princeton University Press, 2007), for which he received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (University of California Press, 2002). Gander also coedited with Raúl Zurita Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) and edited the bilingual anthology Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women (Milkweed Editions, 1993). Gander’s own writing has been translated into several languages.

He lives with the sculptor Ashwini Bhat in California.