Bio

For nearly 15 years, Gabriel Welsch worked in the horticulture and landscaping industry in roles as a crew grunt, production grower, plant buyer, landscape foreman, and garden designer before working in higher education teaching and administration. He writes fiction and poetry, and is the author of four collections of poems: The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse, The Death of Flying Things, An Eye Fluent in Gray, and Dirt and All Its Dense Labor. His work has appeared widely, in journals including Ploughshares, Georgia Review, New Letters, Mid-American Review, Chautauqua, Harvard Review, Ascent, and on Verse Daily and in Ted Kooser’s column “American Life in Poetry.” The title story of Groundscratchers, which appeared originally in Southern Review, was among the Distinguished Stories of 2011 in the Best American Short Stories anthology. A native of Maine and a graduate of the MFA program at Penn State, he now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family. He has worked in marketing, communications, fundraising/advancement, and enrollment management at Penn State, Juniata College, and Duquesne University, where he now serves as vice president of marketing and communications.

Photo credit: Jeremy Neeley