Forrest Gander
Professor of English and Comparative Literature:
Literary Arts and Comparative Literature
Phone: +1 401 863 3299
Forrest_Gander@Brown.EDU
I write fiction, poetry, essays and other works not readily characterized within genre boundaries, and I translate (mostly Latin American) literature. In all these activities, I am concerned with ethical questions: what kind of experience and relationship does language articulate, what kind of account of the suffering and joy of others does imagination avail, what qualities of expression, thought, and feeling can be translated from one culture and language to another?
Biography
Forrest Gander, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, is author of more than a dozen books, including the acclaimed novel, As a Friend, and the poetry collections Eye Against Eye and Torn Awake. The editor of two anthologies of Mexican poetry, Gander also translates: No Shelter: Poems by Pura Lopez Colome and Firefly Under the Tongue: Poems by Coral Bracho are most recent. With Kent Johnson, he has translated two books by Bolivian wunderkind Jaime Saenz. In a collection of essays, A Faithful Existence, Gander explores evolution, literary hoaxes, snapping turtles, and border crossings. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Howard, and Whiting Foundations, among others.
Interests
I have a background in geology and am alarmed enough by the current state of the world to be concerned with environmental politics. I've tried to write in a way that might model a less ego-centered, more ecological poetics, in which events are structured as collaborations between the world and the self, and in which events are related, not only at the level of reference, but through syntax, diction, and rhythms. In my most recent book of poems, Eye Against Eye, intimacy and intervention are prevailing themes. What is involved in the construction of a circumscribed world— at the personal or national level— and what forces impinge upon it? The social pull to be a part of something and the individual need to be apart force us to make decisions that have ethical implications, and those decisions and dimensions have, for me, a definitive grandeur and scope.
Degrees
B.S. in geology; M.A. in English
Awards
United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, 2008
John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2008
Howard Foundation Fellowship, 2005
PEN Translation Fund Award, 2004
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 2001 & 1998
Pushcart Prize, 2000
Jessica Nobel Maxwell Memorial Prize, American Poetry Review, 1998
Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative North American Poetry, 1997 and 1993
Fund for Poetry Award, 1994
Affiliations
The New California Poetry Series, University of California Press, co-editor
The Hofstra Hispanic Review, Advisory Board, 2005-
Boomerang Foundation for the Arts, board member
PEN International, member
Center for Art in Translation, charter member
Associated Writing Programs, member
Association of Literary Translators, member
Teaching
Poetry, World and Mind, a course exploring philosophy and poetry
Translation workshops
Eco-Poetics
Asian and Western poetics in dialogue
Mexican and U.S. literatures in dialogue
Graduate poetry seminars
