Poet and author Dan Gerber was born and raised in western Michigan. He earned his BA from Michigan State University and went on to have a varied career, including stints as a professional racecar driver, high school teacher, journalist, and corporate executive with his family’s company, Gerber Products. With Jim Harrison, Gerber co-edited the literary journal Sumac and has been writer in residence at institutions including Michigan State University and Grand Valley State College. The recipient of a Michigan Author Award, Gerber has also received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contributions to Midwestern Literature.

The author of numerous collections of poetry, including Departure (1973), A Last Bridge Home: New and Selected Poems (1992), Trying to Catch the Horses (1999) and A Primer on Parallel Lives (2007), his work has also been included in The Best American Poetry series. Gerber’s poetry is frequently described as “lucid.” Drawing on anecdote, autobiography, and the lyric tradition, Gerber’s meditative poetry moves from outside event to inner experience. The poet W.S. Merwin described Gerber’s work: “The clear directness of Dan Gerber’s poetry has distinguished it since I began reading it in the early ‘70s. The purity of his language and the sharpness of his attention present landscape, event, and feeling as one.” Tackling subjects from childhood to animals, galaxies to consciousness, landscapes to the World Wars, Gerber’s poetry reflects his wide-ranging interests and experiences. As Gerber told Contemporary Authors, “Randall Jarrell‘s definition of a good poet, “a man who, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, manages to be struck by lightning a half dozen times,’ suits me. The active business of the poet is to keep his lightning rod polished and his ear tuned to the rumblings of distant thunder… A man struck by lightning is seldom appeased by house current.”

Gerber’s fiction and non-fiction writing similarly covers an array of topics and styles. He has written a nonfiction account of the Indianapolis 500 automobile race, in Indy: The World’s Fastest Carnival Ride (1977), several novels, including Out of Control (1974) and A Voice from the River (1990), and a short story collection, Grass Fires (1987). Much of Gerber’s work—poetry, fiction, and essays—concerns man’s search for a sense of purpose and values. Of his work across genres, Gerber told Contemporary Authors, “In poetry as well as prose, I feel less a creator than an instrument of experience. I write what presents itself to me as necessary.”