Dwight Garner

Garner wrote a biweekly column for the New York Times called American Beauties, which focused on under-sung American books of the past 75 years. His championing of certain titles—including The Collected Novels of James Wright and On Fire by Larry Brown —helped return them to print. For Esquire, Garner played in the 2017 World Backgammon Championship in Monaco. He is a member of the Organ Meat Society.

His essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, the Oxford American, Slate, The Village Voice, the Boston Phoenix, The Nation, and elsewhere. For several years he wrote the program notes for Lincoln Center's American Songbook Series. He has served on the board of the National Book Critic's Circle. In a January 2011 column for Slate, the journalist Timothy Noah called Garner a "highly gifted critic" who had reinvigorated The New York Times' s literary coverage, and likened him to Anatole Broyard and John Leonard.

Garner's previous post at The New York Times was as senior editor of The New York Times Book Review, where he worked from 1999 to 2008. He was a founding editor of Salon.com, where he worked from 1995 to 1998. His monthly column in Esquire magazine was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in 2017.

After his graduation from college, Garner was a reporter for The Addison Independent. He then became the arts editor of Vermont Times, a new alternative weekly in Burlington. He also became a contributing editor to the Boston Phoenix. In the 1990s Garner was a columnist for the Hungry Mind Review. After moving to New York City in 1994, he worked for one year as an associate editor at Harper's Bazaar under the editorship of Liz Tilberis.

Dwight Garner (born 1965) is an American journalist and a longtime writer and editor for the New York Times. In 2008, he was named a book critic for the newspaper. His reviews appear on Tuesdays.