Poet Forrest Gander, professor of English and comparative literature, has been named a USA Fellow for 2008 by United Artists of America, a national artists’ advocacy organization. He is one of 50 artists from around the country to receive a $50,000 prize recognizing artistic excellence, unique artistic vision, and significant contributions to their fields.

At Brown, Gander teaches such courses as Poetry/World/Mind, EcoPoetics, Latin American Poetry Live, and Translation Theory and Practice. He holds degrees in both geology and English literature. His sixth translation from Spanish, Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho, was published in April 2008. His novel As a Friend was published in September.

Gander’s work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish; he has read his writing on six continents. In March 2008, he read his work at the International Poetry Festival in Tripoli, Libya, and was part of the first contingent of American writers ever invited to that country.

Gander has won a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Jessica Nobel Maxwell Memorial Prize, and (twice) the 
Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative North American Poetry.

This year’s USA fellows include artists in the fields of architecture and design, crafts and traditional arts, dance, literature, media arts, music, theater arts, and visual arts.