Joseph Gastiger grew up in Westbury, a working class town on Long Island. He was woeful at sports, prone to secret crushes on girls he never approached, and fell in quicksand twice before he was eight. He performed with a jug band at his high school’s Battle of the Bands, not once but twice, and would do it again if he could. Gastiger started college at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, became active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and took summer jobs in candy factories, washing dishes, raking asphalt, and running around with kids at a day camp at John Jay Park.
Eventually he transferred to Iowa, where he studied with two very kind teachers, Michael Burkard and Marvin Bell. He attended graduate school in Fort Collins, where with John Bradley, Yusef Komunyakaa, Billy, Fred, and Michael, he got a fleeting sense of how lucky he was. From there, he headed east to DeKalb to teach writing courses and, for twelve years, coordinated Northern Illinois University’s Honors Program. Here is where he met his wife, Jean, when she walked into a bookshop one sweltering August day looking, of course, for someone else. They have one son and a lovely old house mostly covered in ivy. Since 2001, Joe has served as a pastor at the First Congregational United Church of Christ in DeKalb, Illinois. He is the author of Loose Talk, a first collection of prose poems published by Lost Horse Press in 2012.
