Summary
Gailmarie Pahmeier primarily teaches creative writing and contemporary literature courses. She has been honored with the Alan Bible Teaching Excellence Award and the University Distinguished Teacher Award.
Her work has been widely published and anthologized. Recent journals and magazines include Booth, Spillway, Descant (her poem in this journal earned the 2012 Publisher's Award), Passager and the Pedestal Magazine; her anthologized work appears in such publications as Literary Nevada, New Poets of the American West (her poem in this anthology earned the Editor's Choice Award), the Autumn House Press Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems. She is the author of the poetry collections The House on Breakaheart Road and The Rural Lives of Nice Girls in addition to three chapbooks. Her most recent chapbook, Shake It and It Snows, won the 2009 Coal Hill Chapbook Award. Her literary awards include a Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship, the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame and two Artists Fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council (she was the first literary artist awarded a fellowship in the state of Nevada). She has served the state as Poet in Residence for a program called Power Up Poetry, a gig which took her out into the rural counties of Nevada to talk with students about the importance of poetry and story. In 2007, she received the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts; in 2015, she was appointed as the first Poet Laureate of Reno. In 2016, she was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.
Pahmeier is considered a "domestic" poet; her work focuses primarily on family and home. One anthology that contains her work is Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets do Housework (University of Iowa Press).
Education
- MFA, University of Arkansas, 1983
- B.A., English, Southern Illinois University, 1979