Gary Whitehead

Who is Gary Whitehead?

Gary Joseph Whitehead is an American poet, painter, and cruciverbalist. He is the author of three books of poetry: A Glossary of Chickens Measuring Cubits while the Thunder Claps and The Velocity of Dust. He has also authored three chapbooks of poetry: After the Drowning, A Cool, Dry Place, and Walking Back to Providence. His work has appeared in journals, magazines and newspapers and most notably in The New Yorker and Poetry.

His awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, two Galway Kinnell Poetry Prizes, a Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship at Iowa State University, and a Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Teaching Award in 2003. He has held artist residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Mesa Refuge, and the Heinrich Böll cottage in Ireland. In 2004, he was the recipient of the PEN Northwest Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency Award, and spent April though October, 2005 in a secluded cabin in the woods of southwestern Oregon.