John Gery’s books of poetry include Charlemagne: A Song of Gestures (1983, Plumbers Ink Poetry Award); The Enemies of Leisure (Second edition, 2021; First edition, 1995, “Best Book” award, Publisher’s Weekly; Critic’s Choice Award, San Francisco Review of Books); American Ghost: Selected Poems (tr. Serbian by Biljana Obradović, 1999, European Award, Circle Franz Kafka, Prague); Davenport’s Version (2003, a narrative poem of the Civil War); A Gallery of Ghosts (2008, “Best Book of 2008” Award, The Times-Picayune); Lure (tr. Serbian by Svetlana Nedeljkov, 2012); and Have at You Now! (2014, Nominee, Pushcart Prize). His poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast Review, The Iowa Review, New Orleans Review, New South, Paris Review, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, West Branch, and elsewhere, as well as in Canada, Europe, and Asia. His work has been translated into ten languages.

Gery has published criticism on a wide range of modern and contemporary poets in African American Review, Callaloo, CEA Critic, Contemporary Literature, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Paideuma, South Central Review, and elsewhere, and he is the author of Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness (1996). He has also collaborated on translations of poetry and prose from Serbian, Italian, Spanish, Armenian, Chinese, and French. His other books include, with Vahe Baladouni, For the House of Torkom (1999), translated prose poems of Armenian poet Hmayyag Shems, and the biography, Hmayeak Shems: A Poet of the Spirit (2010); with Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and others, the guidebook, In Venice and in the Veneto with Ezra Pound (2007); and six edited collections, three of contemporary poetry and three of critical essays.

For his work, he has received an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship (1992-93), a Fulbright Fellowship (2007), a Research Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota (2006), Artist Fellowships from the Louisiana Division of the Arts (2002, 2012) and Bucknell University (three times), and visiting lectureships at Ca Foscari University in Venice (2007), Centro Studi Americani (Rome, 2007), Beijing Institute of Technology (2012), and University of Salamanca (2015), among other awards. He has also lectured and given readings in Novi Sad, Nis, Beijing, Tianjin, Busan, London, Cork, Edinburgh, and Salamanca, as well as throughout the U.S. In recent years, he has been a Visiting Poet at colleges and sites in Florida, New York, Maryland, Tennessee, Illinois, California, Idaho, and Pennsylvania.

A Research Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, Gery is founding Director of the Ezra Pound Center for Literature, Brunnenburg, Italy. He currently serves as Secretary of the Ezra Pound International Conference and Series Editor of The EPCL Book Series at Clemson University Press (distributed by Oxford University Press). He lives in New Orleans with his wife, poet Biljana Obradovic, and their son, Petar Gery.