Gary Percesepe is associate editor at New World Writing (formerly Mississippi Review), where he has worked closely with executive editor Frederick Barthelme for many years. Prior to that, he was an assistant fiction editor at Antioch Review. His work has appeared in Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Mississippi Review, Wigleaf, Westchester Review, Brevity, PANK, The Millions, Atticus Review, BULL, The Good Man Project, Word Riot, Necessary Fiction, and many other places. In 2014, Pure Slush Press published his first collection of poetry, FALLING, and a collection of flash fiction titled, ITCH. Percesepe spent twelve years one winter in Buffalo, where he met J and took an axe to the frozen sea inside. Thawed at last, he met Resea Burns in White Plains, New York, and they've been together ever since. Gary Percesepe teaches philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx.

Books by Gary Percesepe:

Other poems on the web by Gary Percesepe:
Five poems
Four poems
Three poems
"Fragment 49"
"far from us"
Four poems

Gary Percesepe's Website.

Gary Percesepe on Twitter.

About The Winter of J:

"In The Winter of J, Gary Percesepe writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and surprising bliss of a doomed relationship with 'J,' a woman who moves fleetingly and luminously through his life one winter season. It is a scorching exploration of both transience and intimacy, transcending the personal to touch a universal connection with all that is."
—Joelle Fraser

"Percesepe cuts himself wide open in this candid portrayal of a love story that soars before bursting into flames and cinders. Lucid and visceral, every page packs an emotional punch. Percesepe dissects the foibles of love with a surgeon's scalpel and a watchmaker's keen eye. The writing is at once subtle but searing, and while the journey he describes is his own, the path will be intimately familiar to any reader who has ever loved and lost someone they cherish."
—Len Kuntz

"The Winter of J is not simply a love story—it takes as its subject the evolution of love from its tender and uncertain beginnings, through disillusion and withdrawal, to the place of after-love, where the writer can attempt recollection in a semblance of tranquility. The love and un-love story plays out in the wintry cityscape of Buffalo —sometimes tender, sometimes solemn, sometimes wryly funny (as when the poet considers whether it's possible to say 'riding shotgun' when referring to a Buddhist passenger), using a mélange of forms, including prose and free verse, and a subtly shifting and tricky point of view. The poems have striking images: the city as 'a white/ shaking dome/ fastened to a great lake;' rich and evocative allusions to Cheever and Rich; and strong statements that marry philosophy to the experience of pain as the poet attempts 'to learn again the calculus of loss, the difficult/ arithmetic of the heart.'"
—Mary Grimm

"'Why am I here? I am here to learn again the calculus of loss,/ the difficult arithmetic of the recalcitrant heart.' Reader, that's why you are here too. Through the recounting of a five-month affair in Buffalo, Gary Percesepe in The Winter of J mines the large life lessons that love discovered and love dissolved have to teach."
—Bill Yarrow

"In his sharp new collection of poems Gary Percesepe gives us pretty much a relationship from A to Z: from the early days 'when everything I wanted was in that room' to the bittersweet ending when the relationship becomes, as Woody Allen famously put it, a dead shark—all capped by the memories that linger, the good and the bad, and the eventual moving on ('The mystery of beginning, resumes.') At times prose-like and lyrical, wise and searching, tender and erotic, jubilant and heartbreaking, Percesepe's writing never fails to keep the reader engaged. And I like that the characters live in Buffalo and Upper Niagara—hardy people from the north country who can teach us about toughness, love and resiliency, and give us wonders like The Winter of J."
—Tim Suermondt