Born in
Barstow, California, Forrest Gander grew up in
Virginia, where he and his two sisters were raised by their single mother, an elementary school teacher.[1] The four shared a two-room apartment in
Annandale. Gander's estranged father ran The Mod Scene, a bar on
Bleecker Street in
Greenwich Village, New York City.[2] With his mother and sisters, Gander began to travel extensively on summer road trips around the United States. The traveling, which never stopped, came to inform his interest in landscapes, languages, and cultures.[3] Forrest and his two sisters were adopted by Walter J. Gander soon after Walter Gander's marriage to their mother, nee Ruth Clare Cockerille.[2] Gander earned a B.S. in geology from the
College of William and Mary and an M.A. in creative writing from
San Francisco State University.[4]
David Kirby, writing in The New York Times Book Review notes that, "It isn't long before the ethereal quality of these poems begins to remind you of similar effects in the work of
T. S. Eliot and the 17th century Anglo-Welsh mystic
Henry Vaughan....In the midst of such questioning, the only reality is the poet's unflinchingly curious mind."[6] Noting the frequency and particularity of Gander's references to ecology and landscape,
Robert Hass, former U.S.
Poet Laureate, calls him "a Southern poet of a relatively rare kind, a restlessly experimental writer."[7] Gander's book Core Samples from the World was a finalist for 2012
Pulitzer Prize and the 2011
National Book Critics Circle Award. The Pulitzer citation notes that Core Samples from the World is "a compelling work that explores cross-cultural tensions in the world and digs deeply to identify what is essential in human experience."[8] With Australian poet-activist
John Kinsella, Gander wrote the cross-genre book Redstart: an Ecological Poetics.
Be With, published in 2018 by
New Directions, was awarded the 2019
Pulitzer Prize in poetry and was
longlisted for the 2018
National Book Award.[9] It is an
elegiac collection of poetry and testament to his anguish over the death of his wife. Gander eventually decided to stop reading publicly from the collection so as not to "perform his grief."[10]
The subjects of Gander's formally innovative essays range from snapping turtles to translation to literary hoaxes. His critical essays have appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, and The New York Times Book Review.
In 2008, New Directions published As a Friend, Gander's novel of a gifted man, a land surveyor, whose impact on those around him provokes an atmosphere of intense self-examination and eroticism. In The New York Times Book Review,
Jeanette Winterson praised As a Friend as "a strange and beautiful novel.... haunting and haunted."[11]As a Friend has been published in translation in half a dozen foreign editions. In 2014, New Directions released Gander's second novel The Trace, about a couple who, researching the last journey of Civil War writer
Ambrose Bierce, find themselves lost in the
Chihuahua Desert. The New Yorker called it a "carefully crafted novel of intimacy and isolation."[12] In The Paris Review, Robyn Creswell commented "Gander's landscapes are lyrical and precise ("raw gashed mountains, gnarly buttes of
andesite"), and his study of a marriage on the rocks is as empathetic as it is unsparing."[13]
Gander is a translator who has edited several anthologies of poetry from Spain, Mexico, and Latin America. In addition, Gander has translated distinct volumes by Mexican poets
Pura López Colomé,
Coral Bracho (for which he was a
PEN Translation Prize finalist for Firefly Under the Tongue), Valerie Mejer Caso, and Alfonso D'Aquino, another poet connected with
ecopoetry.[14] With Kyoko Yoshida, Gander translated Spectacle & Pigsty: Selected Poems of
Kiwao Nomura, winner of the 2012
Best Translated Book Award;[15] in 2016, New Directions published Alice Iris Red Horse, selected poems of
Yoshimasu Gozo, edited by Gander. The second book of his translations, with
Kent Johnson, of Bolivian poet
Jaime Saenz, The Night (Princeton, 2007), received a PEN Translation Award. Gander's critically acclaimed translations of the Chilean Nobel Laureate
Pablo Neruda are included in The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (
City Lights, 2004).
In 2016,
Copper Canyon Press released "Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda," a bilingual edition of Gander's translations of twenty previously unknown and unseen Neruda poems.[16][17]
In 2018, Gander became a reviewer with New York Journal of Books.[18]
The Forrest Gander papers at
Yale University's
Beinecke Library cover Gander's full writing life, and additions to the collection are regularly made by the author.[36]