Gretchen Legler

Gretchen’s booklength works of 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, which won the 2023 Maine Book Award for memoir and the John Cole Award for Maine-based nonfiction. Other honors include two Pushcart Prizes, a Notable Essay in Best American Essays, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment creative writing award, a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, and being a finalist for the Steinberg Essay Prize and the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction.

Her scholarship and writing has appeared in Rustica, 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 unquenchable curiosity and adventurous spirit have taken her to the Kingdom of Bhutan 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’s 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 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 she explored human connections to the sacred in the natural world. She also holds a Master Gardener Certificate from the University of Maine Cooperative Extension and serves on the Board of the Franklin County Maine Cooperative Extension Service, doing her part to promote the growing and sharing of wholesome food and to inspire love of the natural world in this and the next generation. She’s taught creative writing and English at the University of Maine Farmington for more than 20 years and is also the Director of the Campus and Community Garden. She lives with her partner, songwriter Ruth Hill, in Maine’s Western Mountains.