Gary J. Whitehead is the author of three previous books of poetry, most recently A Glossary of Chickens, which was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and published in 2013 by Princeton University Press. He has been the recipient of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship, and the Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Teaching Award. A featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the Princeton Poetry Festival, and the West Caldwell Poetry Festival, he teaches English at Tenafly High School in New Jersey. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The North American Review, and elsewhere. His work has also been featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Guardian's Poem of the Week. He recently moved from the Hudson valley of New York to New Jersey.

Other poems by Gary J. Whitehead in Verse Daily:
May 20, 2013:   "Ararat" "Years later, in spite of his weak knees..."
March 9, 2005:  "The Garden" ""In the garden of the mind the best thought..."

Books by Gary J. Whitehead:

Other poems on the web by Gary J. Whitehead:
Three poems
Three poems
"Gray Water"
"Forgetting"
Four poems
Two poems
"Coronation"
"The Falling Man"

Gary J. Whitehead's Website.

Gary J. Whitehead on Twitter.

About Strange What Rises:

"While much of America is roiling with heady hysterias, along comes Whitehead with quiet, observational poems that impale the heart. 'All at once you're out of love again,' he says, 'and it's like the earth has jerked on its axis'--gorgeous, lapidary lines that have clearly risen from the earth, through the poet, through heart and brain, and, in every poem, established a newfound state of strange grace and shrewd balance. These poems are not soft and harmless; don't for a minute, expect that. They're energies that establish the ground we all rise from, and they give us a place to stand while we watch his 'hanged man kick the air.'"
—Renée Ashley

"It is such a pleasure to sit with Gary J. Whitehead's latest book, Strange What Rises, as these meditations continually search for the profound with deep attentiveness, whether in moments of stillness or in moments of tumult. I was hooked from the very first poem, 'Wild Columbine.' Here is a keen eye for the lyric sweep of a poem braided with a narrative propulsion. Whitehead never averts his gaze, whether in service to beauty or in witness to the painful. He says, 'Let me raise the storms,' and he does just that, with "an avian choir, / days with repeating phrases, // whole summers of arias.'"
—Brian Turner