Gary Eldon Peter
Gary Eldon Peter is a Minneapolis-based author whose work focuses on LGBTQ+ identity, rural life, and the textures of everyday midwestern experience. He retired from the University of Minnesota after twenty-one years as a faculty member in the College of Education and Human Development, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, American literature, law and popular culture, and the future of work and technology. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a JD from William Mitchell College of Law.
Peter’s debut novel, The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen, was published in 2022 by Fitzroy Books, the young adult imprint of Regal House Publishing. The novel won the Minnesota Book Award, the Acheven Book Prize for Young Adult Fiction, the Whippoorwill Book Award for Rural Young Adult Literature, and the Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Silver Award for Young Adult Fiction. NPR named it one of the best Young Adult books of 2022. The book draws on Peter’s deep familiarity with Minnesota landscapes and small-town life to tell the story of a gay teenager navigating first love, family grief, and the slow work of honesty in a rural community that has little vocabulary for any of it.
His earlier work, the linked short story collection Oranges, was published by New Rivers Press in 2018 after winning the Many Voices Project competition in Prose. The collection also received the Gold Medal for GLBTQ+ fiction in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Midwest Book Award, and was a finalist for both the Minnesota Book Award and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His short story “Wedding” was performed on Selected Shorts, the long-running NPR series featuring short fiction read by professional actors, as part of that program’s commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.
Peter’s essays and short stories have appeared in publications including Water~Stone Review, Great River Review, Queer Voices, The Gay and Lesbian Review, School Library Journal, and Scoundrel Time. He has received a McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers, three Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and artist residencies at institutions including the American Academy in Rome, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among many others. He lives in Minneapolis with his partner and is currently at work on a collection of personal essays.
