Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander is an American poet and translator born in 1956 in Barstow, California. He received his B.S. in geology from William and Mary and his M.A. in English literature from San Francisco State University. He is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. His collection Be With (2018) won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The collection is an elegy for his late wife, the poet C.D. Wright, and explores grief, memory, and the natural world with geological precision and emotional depth. Gander's geological training is evident throughout his work's attention to terrain, strata, and material reality. Gander is an accomplished translator of Latin American poetry, including the work of Coral Bracho, Pura López-Colomé, and others. His other collections include Core Samples from the World (2011) and Torn Awake (2001). He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.