50-Word Bio

Gretchen Legler is a farmer, gardener, teacher, writer, and lover of the natural world. Her book Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life won the 2023 Maine Literary Award for memoir and the John Cole Award for Maine-based nonfiction. She lives in rural Maine with her long-time partner, singer-songwriter Ruth Hill. 

 

100-Word Bio

Gretchen Legler is a farmer, gardener, teacher, writer, and lover of the natural world. Her three booklength works of literary nonfiction include: All The Powerful Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook, On The Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station Antarctica, and Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life. Her writing has won numerous awards including the 2023 Maine Book Award for memoir, and the John Cole Award for Maine-based nonfiction. She has been awarded two Pushcart prizes, a Notable Essay mention in Best American Essays, and has been published in venues including Orion and The Georgia Review. She teaches creative writing and English at the University of Maine Farmington, where she is also the Director of the Campus and Community Garden. 

 

Full Bio

Gretchen Legler is a farmer, gardener, teacher, writer, and lover of the natural world. She’s the author of three booklength works of nonfiction: All The Powerful Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook, On The Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station Antarctica, and Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life. Her writing has won numerous awards including the 2023 Maine Book Award for memoir, and the John Cole Award for Maine-based nonfiction. She has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, a Notable Essay designation in Best American Essays, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment creative writing award, a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, and was a finalist for the Steinberg Essay Prize, and the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction.  She teaches creative writing and English at the University of Maine Farmington, where she is also the Director of the Campus and Community Garden. 

 

Her scholarly work, personal essays and other writing has appeared in many journals, magazines and anthologies, including The Maine Review, The Polar Journal, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Studies in the Humanities, Fourth Genre, ISLE, 1996, Brevity, the Georgia Review, Orion Magazine, The Women’s Review of Books, Barry Lopez’s Home Ground: Language for An American Landscape, and Lorraine Anderson’s Sisters of the Earth: Women’s Poetry and Prose About Nature. Her curiosity about the wonders of the natural world has taken her far and wide, including to the Kingdom of Bhutan where she spent a year as a Fulbright Teaching Fellow, to Antarctica as a fellow of the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program, and on a 500-mile pilgrimage across Northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago. 

 

Gretchen has been teaching creative writing for more than 30 years in MFA and undergraduate programs and community workshops in Alaska, Maine, Boston, New Hampshire and elsewhere. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Journalism from Macalester College, a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English and Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota, and a Master’s of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where her interests focused on exploring human connections to the sacred in the natural world. She also holds a Master Gardener Certificate from the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. She currently serves on the Board of the Franklin County Maine Cooperative Extension Service, doing her small part to promote the growing and sharing of wholesome food, and to “inspire love of the natural world in this and the next generation.”