John Gery was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, USA, in 1953, and grew up in Lititz, Pennsylvania. He earned degrees from Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University. He has published three collections of poems: Charlemagne: A Song of Gestures (Plumbers Ink, 1983), which received the Plumbers Ink Poetry Award; The Enemies of Leisure (Story Line, 1995), honored by Publishers Weekly as a "Best Book of 1995" and awarded a 1995-96 Critics Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books and Today's First Edition television series; and American Ghost: Selected Poems (Raska Skola, 1999; Cross-Cultural, 1999), a bilingual English-Serbian collection translated by Biljana D. Obradovic. A new book of poems, Gallery of Ghosts, is forthcoming from Story Line Press in 2001. He has also published two chapbooks, The Burning of New Orleans (Amelia, 1988), winner of the Charles William Duke Long Poem Award, and Three Poems (LeStat, 1989). His other books include his major critical study, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness (University Press of Florida, 1996), as well as For the House of Torkom (Cross-Cultural Communications, 1999), co-translated with Vahe Baladouni, a bilingual volume of the prose poems of Armenian poet Hmayyag Shems.

Gery's poetry, criticism, and reviews have appeared in journals throughout the country, including American Literature, CEA Critic, Chicago Review, Crosscurrents, George Washington Review, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Literary Review, New Virginia Review, Notre Dame Review, Paris Review, Poet Lore, South Central Review, Southwest Review, and Verse. For his work, he has received, among other awards, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the European Award of the Circle Franz Kafka in Prague, two Deep South Writers Poetry Awards, a Wesleyan University Summer Poetry Fellowship, an Artist Mini-Grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets Poetry Award.

A Research Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, Gery has also taught at Stanford, San Jose State, and the University of Iowa. Since 1990 he has served as Director of the Ezra Pound Center for Literature at Brunnenburg Castle, Italy. Currently, he is completing a booklength narrative poem on the Civil War in New Orleans entitled Davenport's Version, and his critical work involves American poetry at the turn of the century, multiculturalism, and chaos theory.