Gary Fincke

Gary Fincke’s poetry collections have won the 2003 Ohio State University/The Journal Poetry Prize, the 2005 Arkansas Poetry Prize, the 2010 Stephen F. Austin Poetry prize, the 2015 Jacar Press Poetry Prize, and the 2018 Wheelbarrow Books (Michigan State) Poetry Prize. Individual poems have received the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, been reprinted twice by Harper’s, and been selected for a Pushcart Prize.

His books in other genres have won the 2003 Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction, the 2015 Elixir Press Fiction Prize, and the 2017 Robert C. Jones Prize for Nonfiction. Since 1984, he has published forty books of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, including a novel-in-stories How Blasphemy Sounds to God and the memoir Amp’d: A Father’s Backstage Pass, an account of immersing himself in his younger son’s life as the lead guitarist of the platinum-selling rock band Breaking Benjamin.

His work has appeared in such periodicals as Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, American Scholar, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Ploughshares, Arts & Letters, and DoubleTake. “After the Three-Moon Era,” first published at Kenyon Review Online, was reprinted in Best American Essays 2020. His essay “The Canals of Mars,” first published in Shenandoah, was reprinted in The Pushcart Prize, XXV, and subsequently reprinted again in The Pushcart Essays, an anthology of the best nonfiction from the first twenty-five years of the Pushcart Prize volumes.

Gary Fincke is the Emeritus Charles Degenstein Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University, where he founded and then directed the Writers Institute and the nationally recognized undergraduate creative writing major for more than two decades.