Gary J.Whitehead has previously authored two chapbooks of poetry, both winners of national competitions in America. Among other awards, he has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Grant in Poetry, a Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship at Iowa State University, and a Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Teaching Award. He has held writing residencies at Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks, Mesa Refuge in northern California, and the Heinrich Boll cottage in Ireland. He lives with his wife in the Hudson valley of New York and works as a high school English teacher in Tenafly, New Jersey.