Office Hours
Monday, Wednesday 10:30-11:30 am
Education
MFA, Warren Wilson College
About Me
Justin Gardiner is the author of three books—the long-form lyric essay Small Altars, winner of a Faulkner-Wisdom Nonfiction Book Award and published by Tupelo Press in 2024; Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic, published as part of the Crux Literary Nonfiction Series by the University of Georgia Press; and the poetry collection Naming the Lifeboat from Main Street Rag. In 2012-2013, Justin served as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Fellow, living for a year at an off-grid homestead in the middle of the Rogue River Wilderness. He is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, where he was awarded both the Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend and the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellowship. His essays and poems have appeared in journals that include The Missouri Review, Blackbird, Quarterly West, Zone 3, and Catamaran. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and serves as the Nonfiction Editor of The Southern Humanities Review. His current writing project, By the Light You Find, is a collection of nature essays set in different National Parks and Wilderness Areas.
Research Interests
Creative Nonfiction, the Lyric Essay, Poetry
Publications
Small Altars, Tupelo Press 2024 (nonfiction)
Naming the Lifeboat, Main Street Rag Press 2020 (poetry)
Beneath the Shadow, University of Georgia Press 2019 (nonfiction)
Courses Taught
ENG 4250: Exploring the Lyric Essay
ENG 4230: Toward The Collective: Poetry in Translation
ENG 3700: Literary Playlist: Writing About Music
ENG 3250: Narrative Forms of Nonfiction