Gary Whitehead Biography

Gary Joseph Whitehead is an American poet, painter, and cruciverbalist. He is the author of Measuring Cubits while the Thunder Claps (David Robert Books, 2008), The Velocity of Dust (Salmon/Dufour Editions, 2004), After the Drowning (Finishing Line Press), A Cool, Dry Place (White Eagle Coffee Store Press), and Walking Back to Providence (Sow's Ear Press). His work has appeared worldwide in journals, magazines and newspapers and most notably in The New Yorker and Poetry.

His awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, two Galway Kinnell Poetry Prizes, a Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship at Iowa State University, and a Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Teaching Award in 2003. He has held artist residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Mesa Refuge, and the Heinrich Böll cottage in Ireland. Whitehead was the founding editor of the now-defunct Defined Providence Press. In 2004, he was the recipient of the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency Award, and spent April though October, 2005 in a secluded cabin in the woods of southwestern Oregon.

Whitehead's crossword puzzles have been published in The New York Sun, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and, most notably, The New York Times. He also has had his puzzles published in Games magazine.

Well known for his poetry, Whitehead is also a painter whose "oil paintings" appear in private and corporate collections in America and the United Kingdom. He currently teaches at the National Blue Ribbon School of Tenafly High School in Tenafly, New Jersey