Peter Grandbois is the author of sixteen books, including: The Gravedigger (2006), selected by Barnes and Noble for its “Discover Great New Writers” program, Nahoonkara, winner of the gold medal in literary fiction in Foreword magazine's Book of the Year Awards for 2011, the novel, half-burnt (finalist in the category of Multicultural Fiction in the 2019 INDIES), a collection of surreal flash fictions, Domestic Disturbances (Publisher’s Weekly pick for Best Book of 2013), as well as its companion volume of fictions, Domestic Bestiary (2023) and four novella collections or “monster double features,” Wait Your Turn, The Glob Who Girdled Granville (honorable mention, IndieFab award for fantasy book of the year in 2014), The Girl on the Swing (Silver Medalist in the category of Best Fantasy of 2015 in the IndieFab awards), and Cat People and Dream Memories of the Fifty Foot Woman (finalist for Best Fantasy in the INDIES awards 2025), as well as the poetry collections, This House That (winner of the Brighthorse Books Poetry Prize and Honorable Mention for the INDIES award in the category of best poetry collection of 2017), The Three-Legged World (Etruscan, 2020), everything has become birds (Brighthorse, 2021), the Snyder prize-winning collection, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021), and Story of a Pilgrim (Tiger Bark Press, 2026). In addition, he has published two memoirs: The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, chosen as one of the top five memoirs of 2009 by the Sacramento News and Review and Kissing the Lobster (2018). His poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in nearly two-hundred magazines, including Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Prairie Schooner, and been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, and Best American Horror. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards, have won the Best of the Neil LaBute Festival and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor for Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio.
Peter is a graduate of the University of Denver (Ph.D. 2006), Bennington College (M.F.A. 2003), and the University of Colorado (M.A. 1991, B.A. 1986). Previously, he taught at California State University in Sacramento and is currently Professor of English at Denison University.
Some words on Story of a Pilgrim:
In the “pine-dark” woods of the human psyche, Story of a Pilgrim chronicles the unfurling of the lyric self by incident and increment. Grandbois knows “the hush lining an owl’s wings mid-flight” and “the wanderings of the indentured moon,” but, what’s more, he knows: “there’s no escaping the footprints inside us.” Every poem in this collection voyages further into the unravelling strangeness that forms the architecture of our dreams and of our waking lives, and in voyaging out, Grandbois returns more profoundly into a passionate interiority. Story of a Pilgrim is a musically intense, luminous foray through grief and depression, and the brief bright moment of a life bookended by darkness. Peter Grandbois is a Deep Image poet, for the twenty-first century, whose work will leave you more alert and more alive, more fluent in the language of flowers and more receptive to the nocturnes in the underbrush.
—Dante Di Stefano
With “Auguries of smoke and wind,” this astonishing book beseeches the pilgrim, “Do not fly. Do not wander. Bend/ to what asks. There is a door. The door is you. The handle is not. Hard to grasp.” Such gnomic wisdom shines throughout the entire collection, one that never takes the easy way out. This quiet work demands we pause, consider, and seek to live, knowing that no matter “what stings us,” still, “we are the forest that shines/in rain.” Thus, we do not need to “fear the ache,” but can turn into wind “with its/ unknowing appetite,” to “weave a language” and a life, all our own. Buy this gorgeous book. Let it be a guide for your own pilgrimage. Trust that you are in the hands of a master, who wants us all to know, “We are also the snow/ That falls like song/ Over everything.” —Betsy Johnson
