I was born and raised in Austin, MN, the birthplace of SPAM (the food, not the computer kind), the youngest of four children. In school, numbers and microscopes were terrifying, but words were a different story. Thanks to outstanding teachers throughout junior high and high school, I quickly found a home in writing and I went on to major in journalism in college.
Despite wanting to be a writer for as long as I could remember, I didn’t come to serious fiction writing until much later in life, well after I earned a J.D. and began a career as an attorney. But the desire to write never really left me. In the late 1980s I started taking classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, an incredible resource for someone taking those first few tentative steps as a fiction writer, and within a few years I’d published a few short stories in small literary journals. Then, some ten years after graduating law school, I sold my house, quit my job, and moved to New York to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. “Life changing” is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but my time there was exactly that, because I finally started to think of myself as a writer.
In graduate school I wrote mostly about what I’d left behind: the Midwest, my career as a reluctant lawyer, childhood, coming out, family and family histories, relationships begun and ended. I returned to the Twin Cities after graduating and juggled a part time corporate job with teaching composition, creative writing, business writing, and whatever else was thrown my way as an adjunct because I wanted to teach almost as much as I wanted to write. Eventually I landed a full-time position at the University of Minnesota, where I taught for 21 years until retiring in 2024.
Oranges, my debut short story collection, won the Many Voices Project competition and was published by New Rivers Press in 2018. It also received the Gold Medal for LGBTQ+ fiction in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Midwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. In 2019, “Wedding,” a story from the collection, was featured on Selected Shorts, the long running public radio program featuring short fiction performed by Broadway, television, and film actors, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. Oranges will be reissued by Regal House in 2028.
My debut novel, The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen, won the Acheven Book Prize for Young Adult Fiction and was published by Regal House in 2022. It received the Minnesota Book Award for Young Adult Literature, the Silver Award in the Foreword Reviews INDIE Book of the Year Awards for Young Adult Fiction, and the Whippoorwill Book Award for Rural Young Adult Literature. It was also named one of the best Young Adult books of 2022 by National Public Radio.
I’m grateful to have been awarded artist residencies to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Anderson Center, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Golden Apple Art Residency, the Tofte Lake Center, Write On, Door County, and others, for providing the gift of time and space to write.
My current project is a collection of essays on aging, gender and identity, home and place, my experiences as an immune compromised person living in a COVID world, religion and faith, and other subjects.
I live and write full-time in beautiful downtown Minneapolis with my partner Tom, a retired technical writer.
You can find out more about me and my work at garyeldonpeter.com.
