Forrest Gander

Read poems by this poet

Forrest Gander was born in Barstow, California. He attended William & Mary and San Francisco State University. He holds degrees in both geology and literature.

Gander is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Mojave Ghost (New Directions, 2024); Knot (Copper Canyon Press, 2022); Twice Alive (New Directions, 2021); and Be With (New Directions, 2018), winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The collection was also long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry. His 2011 collection Core Samples from the World (New Directions) was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. Gander’s twenty-some books in translation include Coral Bracho’s It Must Be a Misunderstanding (New Directions, 2022); Gōzō Yoshimasu’s Alice Iris Red Horse (New Directions, 2016); Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2016); and Pura López Colomé’s WatchWord (Wesleyan University Press, 2012).

Gander is coeditor, with Michael Wiegers, of The Essential C. D. Wright (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and of numerous anthologies of poetry in translation including, Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America, edited with Raúl Zurita (Copper Canyon, 2014). He is also the author of multiple essay collections. With John Kinsella, he coauthored Redstart: An Ecological Poetics (University of Iowa Press, 2012).

Of Gander’s work, poet Robert Hass writes, “Forrest Gander is a Southern poet of a relatively rare kind, a restlessly experimental writer.” Gander’s honors include the Best Translated Book Award bestowed by the University of Rochester’s Three Percent journal, a 2023 Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, Library of Congress, and United States Artists.

Gander was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2017. He was the Briggs-Copeland poet at Harvard University and is currently the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University. He lives in Northern California.