An MSU Alumnus, Poet and award-winning writer, Gildner's work includes eight volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, a novel, and a memoir about coaching a baseball team in 1980s Poland titled The Warsaw Sparks.  Gildner is also the author of The Bunker in the Parsley Fields, which won the 1996 Iowa Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Iowa Press in 1997. His many other books include Blue Like the Heavens: New & Selected Poems (1984), The Second Bridge (1987) and A Week in South Dakota (1987).

"The Warsaw Sparks, his memoir of coaching baseball in communist Poland, has been a 'homerun hit' within a different literary field," said Dr. Joy Dworkin, associate professor of English at Missouri Southern. "In all of his writing, Gary Gildner's voice is direct, unmannered, and intelligent about 'what we do.' How we watch our young toddler watch a deer, how we dream of death, or how we suddenly learn a fresh detail from a family story." 

Gildner has previously been a Senior Fulbright Lecturer to Poland and the former Czechoslovakia, as well as a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, and the William Carlos Williams and Theodore Roethke poetry prizes.