Gaylord Brewer is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where he founded and edits Poems & Plays. He has published 500 poems in journals, six chapbooks, and three full-length collections: Presently a Beast (Coreopsis, 1996), Devilfish (Red Hen, 1999, winner of their inaugural book competition), and Four Nails (Snail’s Pace, 2001). His play Dog My Cats debuted at the NeST (New Southern Theatre) Festival in Nashville in June, 2001. His literary criticism includes David Mamet and Film (McFarland, 1993) and Charles Bukowski (Twayne/Macmillan, 1997). Brewer’s most recent residences were at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, and at the Centre d’Art i Natura in Farrera de Pallars, Spain. He is a native of Louisville, Kentucky, and earned a Ph.D. from Ohio State University.

About Exit Pursued by a Bear:

"Gaylord Brewer writes elegiac poems of a man uneasy in an easy world—one filled with travel, good wines, pâté, but further away with hunger and disaster. That the lightning might strike close to home or the disaster might be lurking inside is contemplated again and again amidst the gorgeous landscapes of autumn, its luscious figs, and the sun rising and setting in Granada, Cádiz, Barcelona, and the billboard-strung highways of early twenty-first-century America. Like the man in ‘A Better Jesus,’ he paints a portrait of someone in love with this world and filled with regret that it must end."
—Barbara Hamby

"It’s impossible for Gaylord Brewer to write a dull poem. Even the most ordinary subject—a fig, a shirt, a sack of grain—is polished by his talent till it not only shines, but laughs back at you like a funhouse mirror. His wry humor is the way he burrows into, through, and out the other side of the most serious issues, which gives these poems the perspective of a Zen monk on martinis. But then, just when you think he’s just another witty bar buddy, he leans over, whispers something in your ear, and leaves you crying in your drink. Put these terrific poems in your survival kit."
—William Greenway