Summary
Gailmarie Pahmeier has been a Nevadan for nearly 40 years. Now Emerita, she taught creative writing and contemporary literature at the University of Nevada, where she was honored with the Alan Bible Teaching Excellence Award and the University Distinguished Teacher Award.
A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has garnered a number of awards and has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of three Artists Fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council, including the prestigious Major Project Fellowship. She is the author of The House on Breakaheart Road, The Rural Lives of Nice Girls, and Of Bone, Of Ash, Of Ordinary Saints (WSC Press, 2020, nominated for the High Plains Book Award), in addition to three chapbooks, one of which, Shake It and It Snows, won the Coal Hill Chapbook Award from Autumn House Press. She has received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts from the state of Nevada, has served the City of Reno as its first Poet Laureate, has been inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, and she has been recognized by Nevada Humanities as an Outstanding Teacher in the Humanities. In 2021, she accepted the position of Poet Laureate, State of Nevada, and she is a 2022 Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets.
She lives in Reno between the river and the railroad tracks with her husband, two exuberant dogs, and a couple of complicated cats.
Education
- MFA, University of Arkansas, 1983
- B.A., English, Southern Illinois University, 1979