Forrest Gander

Pulitzer Prize-winning Forrest Gander is a poet, writer, translator, and editor of several anthologies of writing from Spain and Mexico. He is celebrated for the richness of his language and his undaunted lyric passion. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including collaborations with notable artists and photographers. Most recently, Gander collaborated with the photographer Jack Shear to create the collection Knot (Copper Canyon, 2022). Within Knot are twenty-three lush black and white photographs of a body and cloth performing a provocative ballet, a wrestling match, a tense sequence of appearances and disappearances that immediately take on symbolic weight. The images correspond with Gander’s lyric response. The result is a profound dialogue between word and image, observation and inspiration, imagination and intellect. “What do you see?” one poem asks. “A divinity wrung from a black cloud.”

His poetry collection, Twice Alive (2021), addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Gander’s collection Be With (2018) won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award. The Pulitzer Prize Judges citation calls it, “A collection of elegies that grapple with sudden loss, and the difficulties of expressing grief and yearning for the departed.” The New Yorker reflects on this book: “Be With is a blurted command welling up from yearnings not quite expressible in language.” Be With was published after the passing of Gander’s partner of more than thirty years, the poet C. D. Wright.