John Gery

In 2006, Gery was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota. In the same year he was also the Annadora Gregory Lecturer at Doane College, Nebraska. Gery has also taught at the University of Iowa (1991, 1993) and has been a summer Poet-In-Residence at Bucknell University. He has also lectured at the Centro Studi Americani (Rome), Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Beijing Institute of Technology, University of Roma Tre, and University of Salamanca.

Writing about The Enemies of Leisure (1995) in Louisiana Literature, Alan Golding comments that "the scope and delicacy" of Gery's work "in Ashberry's words, 'takes in the whole world, now, but lightly /Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact." Stephen Behrendt describes Davenport's Version (2003), a book-length narrative poem set during the Union occupation of Civil War New Orleans that portrays "a triangular relationship that melds passion, deception, and betrayal in ways that parallel the tragic and internecine war" itself, as "a remarkable feat of poetic and psychological sleight of hand." "The voice assigned to Davenport," the poem's narrator, observes Behrendt, "is the sort of wise, universalized voice one associates with the narrators of epic works ranging from Homer to Whitman and Crane." About Gery's collection, A Gallery of Ghosts(2008), Susan Larson notes, "Gery's distinctive poetic voice lends seemingly orderly poems an ironic sharpness that cuts close to the bone. These poems convey both the bliss and pain of our existence, never shying away from life's uncomfortable truths." Most recently, in a review of Gery's Have at You Now! (2014), a collection he calls "multiple and wide-ranging," Daniel Wallace writes how "Gery troubles his readers with doubts, failings, and deeply grounded despair" but in verse that "is in turn whimsical, comic, erotic, and nostalgic." And Amy Tercek in Poet Lore observes, "The connection between Hamlet and Have at You Now! is most obvious in poems that examine the conflict between the activist's urge to fight and the artist's need to give form to experience" in what she calls a "beautifully staged collection."

In 1992-1993, Gery received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Louisiana Division of Arts. In 2007, he was awarded a Fulbright Lecturer and Research Fellowship at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade in Serbia. At UNO he was awarded the Seraphia D. Leyda Teaching Fellowship for 2009-2012.

Gery began his academic career lecturing at Stanford and San Jose State Universities for two years respectfully before joining the University of New Orleans (UNO) as an instructor in 1979. In 1999, he became a Research Professor of English at UNO. In 1990 Gery also became founding Director of the Ezra Pound Center for Literature. He has served as Secretary of the Ezra Pound International Conference since 2005 and as Series Editor of the EPCL Book Series at UNO Press since 2008.

Gery is married to the poet Biljana Obradović (1961- ). They have a son, Petar Malcolm Obradović Gery (2003- ).

John Gery (born John Roy Octavius Dougherty, June 2, 1953) is an American poet, critic, collaborative translator, and editor. He has published seven books of poetry, a critical work on the treatment of nuclear annihilation in American poetry, two co-edited volumes of literary criticism and two co-edited anthologies of contemporary poetry, as well as, a co-authored biography and guidebook on Ezra Pound's Venice.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Gery is the son and fourth child of Malcolm R. Dougherty (1922-1960), a U.S. diplomat and businessman of Scotch-Irish and German descent, and Eugenie Gunesh Gery (maiden name, Guran, 1926- ), a homemaker and educator of Turkish and Russian descent. After his parents’ divorce and mother's marriage to Addison H. Gery, Jr. (1923–85), a jazz musician and business executive, Gery spent his youth in the small Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch community of Lititz, Pennsylvania. At age eight, he was legally adopted by his stepfather and had his last name changed. He attended local schools through the tenth grade, demonstrating early a propensity for writing, music and acting. For two years he attended the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey where he received his high school diploma. He received a bachelor's degree from Princeton University with Honors in English (1975), a Master's in English from the University of Chicago (1976), and a Master's in Creative Writing from Stanford University (1978). At Princeton, he studied with poets as diverse as Mark Strand, John Peck, George Garrett, and Theodore Weiss, and at Chicago he studied with Robert von Hallberg and Richard Stern. But perhaps his most influential poetry teacher was Donald Davie at Stanford, where he also worked with Kenneth Fields, Albert Gelpi, N. Scott Momaday, Diane Middlebrook and others.