Michele Gildner
Author Gary Gildner, a new SaddleBrooke resident, has published his twenty-second book, The Capital of Kansas City (BkMk Press), a collection of stories nominated for the 2017 Story Prize.
Nobel Laureate Alice Munro has said of Gildner’s art, “There is such a good feeling about his stories-—that the writer knows his people, the whole texture of their lives, in different lights, that he’ll take you a long way into them and you’ll always be surprised and satisfied in the right way, never tricked or betrayed.”
Among Gildner’s other books are The Warsaw Sparks, a memoir about coaching a Polish baseball team behind the Iron Curtain; My Grandfather’s Book, a ForeWord Magazine Top Ten Book of the Year for 2002, about searching for his immigrant Polish grandfather two decades after his grandfather’s death and The Bunker in the Parsley Fields, which received the Iowa Poetry Prize.
Gildner has also received the National Magazine Award for Fiction, Pushcart Prizes in fiction and nonfiction, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and Fulbright lectureships to Poland and the former Czechoslovakia.
A Michigan native, he has taught at Reed College, Randolph College, Seattle University, Michigan State, Davidson College and Drake University. He has given readings of his work at the Library of Congress, the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Poetry Center of the YMHA and the Academy of American Poets in New York, plus at more than 300 colleges and cultural centers in the U.S. and abroad.