Gary Gildner's 20 published books include: Blue Like the Heavens: New & Selected Poems, Somewhere Geese are Flying: New & Selected Stories, The Second Bridge, Warsaw Sparks and My Grandfather's Book, and The Bunker in the Parsley Fields, which received the 1996 Iowa Poetry Prize.

He has also received a National Magazine Award for Fiction, Pushcart Prizes in fiction and non-fiction, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams and Theodore Roethke poetry prizes, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Gildner has been the writer-in-residence at Reed College, Davidson College, Seattle University, and Michigan State University, and has been a Senior Fulbright Lecturer to Poland and Czechoslovakia. He has given readings of his work at the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets, YM-YWHA (New York), Manhattan Theatre Club, and at some 300 colleges and schools in the U.S. and abroad.

Gary Gildner was born in West Branch, Michigan, and received his B.A. and M.A. in English at Michigan State in 1960 and 1961 respectively. Currently, he lives with his family in Idaho.

"A beautiful book! Poet Gary Gildner is on the trail of many things: the surprises of nature at his place in Idaho, the spirit of Slovakia following the Velvet Revolution, the stagnation of bureaucracy, the fresh words of his late-life daughter. Like one of Conrad's narrators, Gildner senses both the elusiveness of his subject and their kinship. His search proves compulsive, compelling, and ultimately illuminating. The reader will want to follow." -Hunt Hawkins, author of The Domestic Life and President of the Joseph Conrad Society

To view Special Collections' holdings of Gary Gildner's work, please click here.

To hear Gildner read from his own work, please visit the Vincent Voice Library:

• 2001 Reading
• 2004 Reading