Amy Gerstler

Last updated

Amy Gerstler (born 1956) is an American poet living in Los Angeles, California. [1] She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship [2] as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. [3]

Contents

Biography

Amy Gerstler was born in 1956. [4] She is a graduate of Pitzer College and holds an M.F.A. from Bennington College. She is now a professor in the MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, she taught in the Bennington Writing Seminars program, at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing Program. [5]

Gerstler was editor of the 2010 edition of the anthology Best American Poetry . [6] She is also the author of art reviews, book reviews, [7] fiction, and occasional journalistic essays. She has collaborated with visual artists, including Alexis Smith, and her writing has been published in numerous exhibition catalogs.

Her books of poetry include Medicine (finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award) and Bitter Angel (1990) (winner of the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award).

Described by the Los Angeles Times as "one of the best poets in the nation," [8] her 2009 book, Dearest Creature, was named one of the notable books of the year by the New York Times. [9]

Scattered at Sea, her 2015 collection, was longlisted for the National Book Award. [10]

She is married to artist and author Benjamin Weissman.

Works

Related Research Articles

David Trinidad is an American poet.

Eloise Klein Healy is an American poet. She has published five books of poetry and three chapbooks. Her collection of poems, Passing, was a finalist for the 2003 Lambda Literary Awards in Poetry and the Audre Lorde Award from The Publishing Triangle. Healy has also received the Grand Prize of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival and has received six Pushcart Prize nominations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amy Hempel</span> American journalist

Amy Hempel is an American short story writer and journalist. She teaches creative writing at the Michener Center for Writers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Lerner</span> American writer

Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic and teacher. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rigoberto González</span> American writer and book critic (born 1970)

Rigoberto González is an American writer and book critic. He is an editor and author of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and bilingual children's books, and self-identifies in his writing as a gay Chicano. His most recent project is Latino Poetry, a Library of America anthology, which gathers verse that spans from the 17th century to the present day. His memoir What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. He is the 2015 recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle, the 2020 recipient of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and the 2024 recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Review of Books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Hirshfield</span> American poet, essayist and translator

Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator, known as 'one of American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere' and recognized as 'among the modern masters,' 'writing some of the most important poetry in the world today.' A 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, her books include numerous award-winning collections of her own poems, collections of essays, and edited and co-translated volumes of world writers from the deep past. Widely published in global newspapers and literary journals, her work has been translated into over fifteen languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maggie Nelson</span> American writer

Maggie Nelson is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brenda Shaughnessy</span> American poet (born 1970)

Brenda Shaughnessy is an Asian American poet most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda and So Much Synth. Her book, Our Andromeda, was named a Library Journal "Book of the Year," one of The New York Times's "100 Best Books of 2013." Additionally, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly named So Much Synth as one of the best poetry collections of 2016. Shaughnessy works as an Associate Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing program at Rutgers University–Newark.

Mark Wunderlich, is an American poet. He was born in Winona, Minnesota, and grew up in a rural setting near the town of Fountain City, Wisconsin. He attended Concordia College's Institute for German Studies before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, where he studied English and German literature. After moving to New York City he attended Columbia University, where he received an MFA degree.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victoria Chang</span> American poet and childrens writer

Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adrian Matejka</span> American writer

Adrian Matejka is an American poet. He was the poet laureate of Indiana for the 2018–2019 term. Since May 2022, he has been the editor of Poetry magazine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Idra Novey</span> American novelist, poet, and translator

Idra Novey is an American novelist, poet, and translator. She translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Persian and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carmen Giménez</span> American writer and editor

Carmen Giménez, also known as Carmen Giménez Smith, is an American poet, writer, and editor.

Trinie Dalton is an author, editor, and curator based in Los Angeles. She teaches creative writing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robin Coste Lewis</span> American poet

Robin Coste Lewis is an American poet, artist, and scholar. She is known primarily for her debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2015––the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize in the National Book Foundation's history, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974. Critics called the collection "A masterpiece", "Surpassing imagination, maturity, and aesthetic dazzle", "remarkable hopefulness ... in the face of what would make most rage and/or collapse", "formally polished, emotionally raw, and wholly exquisite". Voyage of the Sable Venus was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award, and the California Book Award. The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Buzz Feed, and Entropy Magazine all named Voyage one of the best poetry collections of the year. Flavorwire named the collection one of the 10 must-read books about art. And Literary Hub named Voyage one of the "Most Important Books of the Last Twenty Years". In 2018, MoMA commissioned both Lewis and Kevin Young to write a series of poems to accompany Robert Rauschenberg's drawings in the book Thirty-Four Illustrations of Dante's Inferno. Lewis is also the author of Inhabitants and Visitors, a chapbook published by Clockshop and the Huntington Library and Museum. Her next book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, was published by Knopf in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aracelis Girmay</span> American poet

Aracelis Girmay is an American poet. She is the author of three poetry collections, including Kingdom Animalia (2011), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. She is also an assistant professor of poetry at Hampshire College. She has been teaching at Stanford University since the summer of 2023.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is an American poet, editor, essayist, and professor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jasmin Darznik</span> American author

Jasmin Darznik is an Iranian-born American writer. She is the New York Times bestselling author of three books, The Bohemians, Song of a Captive Bird, a novel inspired by the life of Forugh Farrokhzad, Iran's notorious woman poet, and The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life, which became a New York Times bestseller. A New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" and a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Song of a Captive Bird was praised by The New York Times as a "complex and beautiful rendering of [a] vanished country and its scattered people; a reminder of the power and purpose of art; and an ode to female creativity under a patriarchy that repeatedly tries to snuff it out." The Bohemians was selected by Oprah Daily as one of the best historical novels of 2021. Darznik's books have been published in seventeen countries.

Anya Krugovoy Silver was an American poet. She won a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Georgia Author of the Year Award.

Hannah Sanghee Park is an American poet. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Same-Different, winner of the 2014 Walt Whitman award of the Academy of American Poets.

References

  1. Poetry Foundation page on Amy Gerstler
  2. "Amy Gerstler". gf'org.
  3. "National Book Critics Circle: awards". bookcritics.org. Archived from the original on 2019-04-27. Retrieved 2018-12-14.
  4. "Amy Gerstler". Poetry Foundation. 2018-12-13. Retrieved 2018-12-14.
  5. Poetry Foundation page on Amy Gerstler
  6. Poetry Foundation page on Amy Gerstler
  7. Gerstler, Amy (27 August 2017). "In the Key That Our Souls Were Singing". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2018-12-14.
  8. "Amy Gerstler's message: Be not afraid". 27 September 2009 via LA Times.
  9. Kirby, David (5 November 2009). "Book Review - 'Dearest Creature,' by Amy Gerstler". The New York Times.
  10. Gerstler, Amy (2015). Scattered at sea. ISBN   9780143126898. OCLC   892458622.
  11. Kirby, David (2009-11-05). "Book Review | 'Dearest Creature,' by Amy Gerstler". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2018-04-06.