A writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, Forrest Gander was born in California’s Mojave Desert and grew up in Virginia. He earned a degree in geology from the College of William & Mary and an MA in literature from San Francisco State University.
He taught at Harvard University and then Brown University, where he was the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature. He’s the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, a Best Translated Book Award, The Whiting Award, two Gertrude Stein Awards for innovative North American writing, and other awards, as well as fellowships from the Library of Congress, Guggenheim, and United States Artists foundations.
His books, often concerned with ecology and intimacy, include Mojave Ghost (New Directions, 2024), Twice Alive (New Directions, 2021), Be With (New Directions, 2018), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and the desert novel The Trace (New Directions, 2015), among others. Gander’s many translations include Alice Iris Red Horse: Selected Poems of Yoshimasu Gozo (New Directions, 2016) and Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Gander has often collaborated with artists such as Ann Hamilton, Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, and Eiko & Koma.
Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, The Yale Review, The Point, and elsewhere. Her recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague, Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget, and To Live Is to Resist, a biography of Antonio Gramsci. She is a MacDowell fellow and the recipient of Grant for Work in Progress from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. With Alice Kaplan, she is the co-author of States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2024. In this collection of essays, she focuses on landscapes where personal and ecological loneliness entangle and inform each other—like flooded airports, disappearing lakes, or a fake city for self-driving cars.