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Winner of the 2023 Whippoorwill Book Award for Rural Young Adult Literature

Recommended Reading for Pride Month 2023 and 2024, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP)

Silver winner in the 2022 Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Awards for Young Adult Fiction

Winner of the 2023 Minnesota Book Award in Young Adult Literature

A Best Book of 2022, National Public Radio

“Recommended Summer Reading” for 2022, Star Tribune

Gary Eldon Peter’s debut novel, The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen, winner of the 2023 Whippoorwill Book Award for Rural Young Adult Literature, the 2023 Minnesota Book Award in Young Adult Literature, and the 2023 Silver award in the 2022 Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Awards for Young Adult Fiction, was published by Fitzroy Books/Regal House in 2022. His award-winning short story collection, Oranges, was published by New Rivers Press in 2018.

Gary’s short stories and essays have appeared in Water~Stone Review, Great River Review, Queer Voices, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Scoundrel Time, and other publications. His story “Wedding” was performed on Selected Shorts, the long-running and distinguished National Public Radio series featuring short fiction read by respected actors from film, television, and the Broadway stage.

Gary was a faculty member for 21 years in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, where he taught courses in writing, law and popular culture, and the future of work and technology, to both undergraduate and graduate students. He lives in St. Paul, MN, where he now writes full-time.

Find out more about Gary here, and more about his books here. The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen is available through Regal House Publishing, Amazon (paperback and Kindle), Indiebound, bookshop.org, and Barnes & Noble, or from your local independent bookseller. Oranges is available through Amazon (paperback and Kindle), Small Press Distribution, Indiebound, bookshop.org, and Barnes & Noble, or from your local bookseller.

PRAISE FOR GARY’s WORK

“Set in richly described southern Minnesota, Peter’s YA debut [The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen] is a compact, touching introspection on one gay teenager’s first love….an alternate and necessary perspective to queer youth’s myriad challenges.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Gary Eldon Peter’s debut novel, The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen, is what great young adult fiction should be. It’s brilliant, beautiful, and brave—the sort of story that grabs you by the hand and pulls you forward, page after page, until you reach the end and finally take a breath. There’s nothing complicated about it: this is a great novel.”

—Bryan Bliss
National Book Award long-listed author of
We’ll Fly Away

“What we do as artists is gather up pieces of lives and try our best, if not to make sense of them, then at least to find or create patterns that help rescue them from rubble. ‘Knock hard. Life is deaf,’ Mimi Parent wrote. Oranges, like all great writing, never lets down but keeps on leaning towards us, speaking, till we listen—hard.”

 —James Sallis
Author of Willnot and Drive

 Read more about what people are saying about Gary’s work here.

AWARDS AND HONORS

Gary’s novel, The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen, is the winner of the 2023 Whippoorwill Book Award for Rural Young Adult Literature, the 2023 Minnesota Book Award in Young Adult Literature, the Acheven Prize For Young Adult Fiction, and several other honors. His linked short story collection, Oranges, won the Midwest Book Award and the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project competition in Prose, and received the Gold Medal for GLBTQ+ fiction in the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He has also been awarded a McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers/Loft Award in Creative Prose as well as two Minnesota State Arts Board grants.

Discover more about Gary’s honors and other news and happenings here.