BOOKS
In the Closet: A Triad
Patrice: A Poemella
Waiting: Prosepoems
Alex: The Double-Rescue Dog
WRITERS PROGRAM
2023 Jack Straw Writers Fellow
PUBLICATIONS
Jack Straw Writers Anthology, Volume 27, 2023
Evening Street Review, Autumn 2022
Jacar Press: Anthology: Dreams of the River, Fall 2021
HerStry, November 2021
Sinister Wisdom, October 2021 (Drawings)
Tipping the Scales Literary Journal, June 2021
Foglifter, May 2021
Santa Fe Writers Project, May 2021
Poetry Pacific, May 2021
Ligeia Magazine, October 2020
The Bombay Review, October 2020
Neuro Logical, August 2020
Adelaide, July 2020
ang(st): the feminist body zine, July 2020
Sinister Wisdom, Summer 2020
South Loop Review: Creative Nonfiction + Art
Bayou Magazine
Under the Sun
Otoliths
Sunday Ink: Works by the Uptown Writers
Canadian Jewish Outlook
AWARDS
In the Closet: A Triad | 2022 Foreword INDIES BOOK of the Year | Finalist: LGBTQ+ Fiction
In the Closet: A Triad | A Notable 100 Book | 2022 Shelf Unbound Best Indie Book Competition
In the Closet: A Triad | 2022 IAN Book of the Year Award | Independent Author Network | Finalist: LGBTQ+ Fiction
In the Closet: A Triad | 2022 American Fiction Award | American Book Fest | Finalist: LGBTQ+ Fiction
Alex: The Double-Rescue Dog | National Indie Excellence Awards 2016 | Picture Books-All Ages Finalist
The Moth, Theme = Escape: Skinner Auditorium / St. Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle (StorySLAM winner, May 20, 2016)
Patrice: A Poemella | Silver IPPY Award: GLBT Fiction | Independent Publisher Book Awards 2015
Communications Arts 2013 Award of Excellence, 54th Annual Design Exhibition, Starbucks Coffee Company packaging, editor
Patrice: A Poemella | 2009 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest | honorable mention
“Avatar of a Lesbian” | prosepoem | Richard Hugo House 2009 New Works Competition | honorable mention
Swayed | screenplay |2008 Pacific Northwest Writers Association Screenwriting Contest | finalist
“Gravel Path”| poem | 2007 Seattle Public Library Poetry Contest | honorable mention
“Constant Repair” | poem | 2006 Seattle Public Library Poetry Contest | honorable mention
“The Red Hat” | short story | 1999 Dora Teitelboim Foundation Third Annual Jewish Cultural Writing Contest | third place
REVIEWS
I Claudio (post on Tuesday, December 7, 2010, after a Richard Hugo House Reading, Seattle)
Of the eight authors my favorite reading was done by the elegant Geri Gale. She is a mature, refined writer and tonight she read one pissed-off poem with a soothing voice of an NPR moderator.
It was strange hearing that voice expressing those words. Her poem was a sharp clear message of anger, opinion and call to action and yet the juxtaposition could not have been stronger. I thought of a thousand actors who could have read Ms. Gale’s poem and blown the roof off of Hugo House and yet I wonder if it would have had the same effect. For the rest of that night, I could not remove that portion of the evening’s program out of my head.
Read more at http://iclaudio2000.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html
Toward the end of Geri Gale’s “In the Closet: A Triad,” she writes, “. . . through the years—through Thelonious Monk and Emily Dickinson, and . . . Diane Arbus—there was a crossfade between light and darkness.” The central character S. explores this world of shadow and illumination from within her grandparents’ closet where she melds into and emerges transformed from meditations on jazz, poetry and photographic image—a mélange of memory, sensation, beauty, desire, grief, despair, transcendence and the cadences of soul that compel the creation of art, often at immense personal sacrifice. The singular achievement of Gale’s work is the quality of attention she brings to the lives and creativity of three iconic artists, and the reverberations of their work on S’s family, friends and, ultimately, her own artistic freedom.
—Deborah Pursifull
poet & technologist
An intense, sumptuous prose-poetry exploration of inspiration, sacrifice and art.
With uninhibited brush strokes, Gale’s impassioned debut offers an extended, self-reflexive allegory of artistic abnegation and creation. The author marries the characterization of prose to the sensuality and linguistic precision of poetry in a form she dubs a “poemella.”
A baroque, sensual tour de force that elevates art above all else.
—Kirkus Reviews
She is a kaleidoscope of interior life—prosepoems both cutting and lyrical that fit together like bits of colored glass. Geri Gale brings an edgy and utterly unique voice to American poetics.
—Priscilla Long, poet and author of The Writer’s Portable Mentor:
A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life
www.priscillalong.com
Her work is exotic and erotic and takes us to places we’ve never been to before.
—Irene Drennan, poet
Geri Gale’s style dazzles. She works hard at her writing. She honors the words, the story, the language.
—Robert Ray, writer & teacher; author of The Weekend Novelist, The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel, and eight novels, five in the Matt Murdock Mystery series; co-author of The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery
www.weekendnovelist.com
From her first words, the poetics of this transformative work take you on a wonderful creative journey. Unlike any other offerings of literary imagination I’ve digested, Patrice is an intimate, sensuous and historical encounter with the creative process of souls merging through art, with all its simple joys woven in with the intimate struggle entailed. This is achieved by delving beyond the surfaces of appearances and into the depths of seeking the mystery and meaning of existence through patient dialogue between a muse and painter.
—Gordon Wood, painter & teacher
Gordon H. Wood Art & Design
www.gordonwoodart.com
I take her work out like I would a snifter of Grand Marnier and sip it because it’s so rich, aromatic, and the ritual of the amount of drink and the glass that holds it matters.
—Lori DeMarre
photographer & visual artist
Your characters and their milieu are all appealing, and the wartime setting I haven’t seen before. I love the romantic sweep of your piece, and the strange blend of fantasy and hard history reminded me variously of Portrait of Jennie, The White Hotel, The English Patient, even my favorite movie Xanadu. I liked Louis and Hadrian and the beautiful lessons that the goddess Patrice came down to earth to teach us.
—Kevin Killian, poet & editor
Krupskaya Books
Wonderful. It takes guts to do this, so keep doing it [Patrice]. Story is incidental here. . . . You will have to pay for this beauty with your blood, you know. Style beyond story. Story hinted at in a few lines but imploded and compressed so the reader has to long for the little islands of narrative hidden like jewels in a river of gold.
—Jack Remick, poet, novelist, screenwriter & teacher; author of Deification and Blood; co-author of The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery
www.jackremick.com