Fellow: Brieghan Gardner, Poet, Nottingham

Brieghan Gardner is a poet and educator.  Her poetry has been published in journals including Atlanta Review, Slipstream, and Poetry East. She is a three-time recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, which is awarded to young poets with unusual promise.

Gardner holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in writing from the University of New Hampshire, where she went on to teach first-year writing and creative nonfiction. She spent three summers teaching English, poetry, and Spanish to high school students preparing for college at UNH’s Upward Bound program.

While a master’s degree student, she earned the Dick Shea Memorial Award for Excellence in Poetry Writing. Gardner lists among her influences the poets Jane Hirshfield, Mekeel McBride, Li-Young Li, Louise Glück, and Robert Bly.

In her artist statement Gardner wrote, “My work is deeply concerned with nature and with natural forces and cycles; it tends to focus on the calendar and the natural events by which I find myself marking time. My poems explore the overlaps between the organic and the inorganic, between dream and reality, between mortal form and immortal formlessness. I’m especially interested in interactions between the animal world and the human world and what they can tell us.”

Last updated: January 28, 2011