G.C. Waldrep is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021); and The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, 2024).  He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Bucknell University and director of Bucknell’s Creative Writing Program.

Waldrep’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Yale Review, Colorado Review, The Nation, Harper’s, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and many other journals in the USA and abroad, as well as in Best American Poetry anthology series and the second edition of Norton’s Postmodern American Poetry. With Ilya Kaminsky he co-edited Homage to Paul Celan (Marick, 2011), and with Joshua Corey he co-edited The Arcadia Project:  North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta, 2012).

Waldrep’s work has received awards from the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets as well as the Colorado Prize (for his first collection, Goldbeater’s Skin), the Dorset Prize (for his third collection, Archicembalo), the Campbell Corner Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. He has received numerous residencies and fellowships, including the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Lannan Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Djerassi Resident Arts Program, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Willapa Bay Artist-in-Residence Program, Hawthornden International Writers Retreat (Scotland), and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland).  He was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, in 2021.

Waldrep was born in 1968 in South Boston, Va., near the North Carolina border. He graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. in American history (1990) and then received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American history from Duke University (1992, 1996). His revised dissertation, Southern Workers and the Search for Community: Spartanburg County, S.C., won the inaugural Richard L. Wentworth Prize from the University of Illinois Press (2000).

Waldrep left academia in 1996 in order to join the New Order Amish community then at Yanceyville, N.C. Subsequently he received an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop (2005) and returned to academia with visiting assistant professorships at Deep Springs College and Kenyon College before joining the faculty at Bucknell University in 2007.  From 2007 to 2018 he served as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review, and from 2011 to 2021 he was editor of the journal West Branch.  He is a member of the Old Order River Brethren and divides his time between Lewisburg, Pa., and Franklin Co., Pa.