In addition to three novels, a short story collection and six books of poetry, Dan Gerber's work has been published in a wide variety of magazines and journals, including: The New Yorker, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Outside, The Nation, The Georgia Review, Fourth Genre, Tricycle and Poetry. He was the recipient of the Michigan Author Award in 1992, had work selected for The Best American Poetry 1999, and received The Mark Twain Award for distinguished contributions to Midwestern Literature in 2001. His most recent collection of poems is Trying to Catch the Horses (Michigan State University Press, 1999) and his most recent book, a collection of biographical essays called, A Second Life; A Collected Nonfiction (Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, Michigan, 2001).

Novelist Jim Harrison, who coedited the literary journal Sumac with Gerber from 1968-72, provides the epigraph for one poem and a perfect summation of Gerber's gifts: "It's very difficult to look at the world and into your heart at the same time." Gerber's poems, imbued with a mystical Zen pantheism—a still and clarified center—instruct and console by their unadorned revelations in which the human, represented by Gerber, cohabit the natural world without dominating it.

He and his wife, Debbie, live in the Santa Ynez Valley of California and spend summers on the Idaho-Wyoming border.