Gretchen Primack

Bio

Gretchen Primack is a poet and teacher living in New York's Hudson Valley. Her publication credits include The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, New Orleans Review, Rhino, Tampa Review, 6x6, and many others, and her work has been chosen for several anthologies, including Best New Poets 2006 and Riverine: A Hudson Valley Anthology. Her chapbook The Slow Creaking of Planets came out last year with Finishing Line Press, her full-length manuscript Fiery Cake has been shortlisted for several prizes, including the Gerald Cable Book Award and the Beatrice Hawley Book Award, and she has completed a second full-length manuscript, Buzz, and a second chapbook manuscript, Kind.

Gretchen is a professor and academic advisor at two maximum-security men's prisons through Bard College's Bard Prison Initiative (BPI).

She is a passionate advocate for the rights and welfare of non-human animals and lives with several of them, along with a beloved human named Gus.

Gretchen used to be a union organizer and then a working women's advocate before turning to poetic and pedagogical pursuits.

PUBLICATION CREDITS

The Slow Creaking of Planets (chapbook) 2007 (Finishing Line Press)

Best New Poets 2006, Meridian Press, University of Virginia ("Colors")
Big City Lit ("Parting")
Bloom ("Space Exploration")
Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review ("Space")
Bridges ("Toni, 1C")
Brooklyn Review ("16mm")
Cimarron Review ("Space Exploration")
The Cortland Review ("August," "Somewhere Along the Way")
Crab Creek Review ("Great Blasket Island")
Entelechy ("Patient")
FIELD ("Patient," "Colors," "Milk Pail Market," "March")
5 AM ("Seventh Grade")
Global City Review ("Spring Night")
Hungry as We Are: An Anthology of Washington Area Poets, Washington Writers' Publishing House ("Space Exploration")
Innisfree ("The Absence of Unnecessary Hurting," "Eccentric")
Lumina ("Of the Girl")
Open City ("It Is Green")
The Paris Review ("The Real World," "Child," "September")
Poet Lore ("Daughter")
Prairie Schooner ("Midnight," "Smoushound")
Rhino ("Avenue")
Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers Codhill Press ("The Dogs and I Walked Our Woods")
6X6 ("Sylvia, 1A," "Mrs. Frumple, 1B," "Cecil Muttershead, 1D," "Gina Kim, Elevator Repair," Bea (and Rachel), 5C," "M. Leigh Keely, 8C")
Sulphur River Literary Review ("Tony's Goodbye," "The Drawbridge," "The Famous Artist Makes a Visit")
Tampa Review ("The Albert Einstein Memorial")
Terrain ("Alan Anderson, 3D")