Justin Gardiner is the author three books—the long-form lyric essay Small Altars, winner of a Faulkner-Wisdom Nonfiction Book Award and a Georgia Author of the Year Award, published by Tupelo Press in 2024; Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic, published as part of the Crux Literary Nonfiction Series by the University of Georgia Press; and the poetry collection Naming the Lifeboat from Main Street Rag. In 2012-13, Justin served as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Fellow, living for a year at an off-grid homestead in the middle of the Rogue River Wilderness in southern Oregon. He is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, where he was awarded both the Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend and the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellowship. His essays and poems have appeared in journals that include The Missouri Review, Blackbird, Quarterly West, Zone 3, and Catamaran. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at Auburn University and serves as the nonfiction editor of The Southern Humanities Review.

When not teaching or at his desk writing, Justin tends to be off in the woods–either in the big wilderness areas out West or somewhere on his 12-acre property in West Georgia alongside Palmetto Creek.

**To prepare for this workshop, please read these two short essays: Mary Wang's Sad White Women, and Jericho Parms' Lost Wax.

If you have any trouble accessing them, email administrator@georgiawriters.org and we will send you them to you.

Lyric Forms of the Essay

Led by author, Justin Gardiner