Gary Fincke is the winner of the 2003 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the 2003 Ohio State University/The Journal Poetry Prize, the 2005 Arkansas Poetry Prize, the 2010 Stephen F. Austin Poetry prize, the 2015 Jacar Press Poetry Prize, the 2015 Elixir Press Fiction Prize, the 2017 Robert C. Jones Prize for Nonfiction, and the 2018 Wheelbarrow Books (Michigan State) Poetry Prize. Since 1984, he has published forty books of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, including collections of essays from Michigan State and Stephen F. Austin as well as the memoir Amp’d: A Father’s Backstage Pass, an account of immersing himself in his younger son’s life as the lead guitarist of the platinum-selling rock band Breaking Benjamin.

His work has appeared in such periodicals as Harper's, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, American Scholar, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Ploughshares, Arts & Letters, and DoubleTake. Twice awarded Pushcart Prizes, he has been recognized by Best American Stories and the O. Henry Prize series, and cited eighteen times in the past twenty-one years for a "Notable Essay" in Best American Essays.

“After the Three-Moon Era,” the lead essay in The Mayan Syndrome, first published at Kenyon Review Online, was reprinted in Best American Essays 2020. His essay "The Canals of Mars," first published in Shenandoah, was reprinted in The Pushcart Prize XXV, and subsequently reprinted again in The Pushcart Essays, an anthology of the best nonfiction from the first twenty-five years of the Pushcart Prize volumes.
Gary Fincke is the Emeritus Charles Degenstein Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University, where he founded and then directed the Writers Institute and the nationally recognized undergraduate creative writing major for more than two decades.

The Mayan Sydrome, an essay collection by Gary Fincke,
is now available from MadHat Press.