Forrest Gander (born 1956) is an American poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and translator.
Born in the Mojave Desert, he was raised in Virginia where he attended The College of William and Mary, majoring in geology, a subject referenced frequently in both his poems and essays. He received an M.A. in English from San Francisco State University and moved to Mexico, where he began to assemble poems and translations for Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women, a bilingual anthology. From Mexico, he moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where he worked as a printer, and then to Providence, Rhode Island. Gander is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. He has taught at Providence College and Harvard University. Currently, he is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literatures at Brown University in Rhode Island.
His poetry is lyrical, but often complex rhythmically and structurally. Critic Karla Huston, writing in "Library Journal," notes that, "Owing to the poems' placement on the page and the near absence of punctuation, the reader is propelled through the verse, left with a sense of urgency and awe." Because of the frequency and particularity of Gander's references to the Virginia landscape, Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet Laureate, calls him "a Southern poet of a relatively rare kind, a restlessly experimental writer."
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, The Boston Review, and The Providence Journal.
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." It needs, she wrote, "to be read slowly, to be uncovered like a secret or discovered like a treasure."
Gander is a translator. Besides editing two anthologies of Mexican poetry, Gander has translated discrete volumes by Mexican poets: "Watchword" and "No Shelter" by Pura Lopez Colome" and (PEN Translation Prize Finalist) "Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho." "The Night" (Princeton, 2007), the second book of his translations, with Kent Johnson, of Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz, 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)