Gildner's 20 published books include: Blue Like the Heavens: New & Selected Poems, Somewhere Geese are Flying: New & Selected Stories, The Second Bridge (a novel), Warsaw Sparks and My Grandfather's Book (memoirs), and The Bunker in the Parsley Fields, which received the 1996 Iowa Poetry Prize. He has also received a National Magazine Award for Fiction, Pushcart Prizes in fiction and non-fiction, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams and Theodore Roethke poetry prizes, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Gildner has been writer-in-residence at Reed College, Davidson College, Seattle University, and Michigan State University (his alma mater), and has been a Senior Fulbright Lecturer to Poland and to Czechoslovakia. He has given readings of his work at the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets, YM-YWHA (New York), Manhattan Theatre Club, and at some 300 colleges and schools in the U.S. and abroad.