BIO

Gary Eldon Peter’s debut novel, The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen, won the Acheven Book Prize for Young Adult Fiction and was published by Fitzroy Books/Regal House Publishing. It was also named one of the best Young Adult books of 2022 by National Public Radio and received the Minnesota Book Award, the Silver Award in the Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Awards for Young Adult Fiction, and the Whippoorwill Book Award for Rural Young Adult Literature.

His linked short story collection, Oranges, won the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project competition in Prose and the Midwest Book Award, was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and received the Gold Medal for GLBTQ+ fiction in the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Gary’s short stories and essays have appeared in Water~Stone Review, Great River Review, Queer Voices, The Gay & Lesbian Review, School Library Journal, 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, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.

His other awards include a McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers/Loft Award in Creative Prose and three Minnesota State Arts Board grants. He has been awarded artist residencies to the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Golden Apple Art Residency, the Tofte Lake Center, the American Academy in Rome, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, the Siena Art Institute, Write On, Door County, and the Anderson Center.

Gary holds an an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a JD from William Mitchell College of Law and recently retired after 21 years as a faculty member in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, law and popular culture, and the future of work and technology. He now works as a freelance teaching artist and manuscript consultant. He lives in Saint Paul, MN near the Mississippi River with his partner and is currently working on a collection of personal essays.