Poet, fiction writer and memoirist Gary Gildner is always aware of where he is, engaged with landscape, people and circumstance. But his is an energy of the internal, and the impact of situation on self centers his work in lyric intuition. His “A Walk Up White Bird Hill” begins, “I know the many shoulders of rock I make my way over / rolled out after a great heaving, shuddered / still, and in the long slow leavening / of dust and water, grass and animals and blood / became this place come to be named / for one who could fly.”

The well-traveled Gildner writes often about place, from Iowa where he taught for many years at Drake University, to his current home on a ranch in Idaho’s Clearwater Mountains. In between, he has lived in Warsaw, Poland, where he coached the city’s baseball team (as well as studied as a Fulbright scholar) and in Slovakia as it became its own nation.

Both those experiences produced books, The Warsaw Sparks (1990 memoir) and The Bunker in the Parsley Field (1996 poetry), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Gildner has also been awarded three Pushcart Prizes, two NEA fellowships, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, and both the William Carlos Williams and Theodore Roethke prizes for poetry. His new book, Somewhere the Geese Are Flying: New and Selected Stories, has just been released by the Michigan State University Press. His success in diverse genres marks him one of America’s most accomplished literary voices.

Gary Gildner brings his energetic presence here, in the Rufus Reiberg Creative Reading Series at the IUPUI Library, on Thursday, Sept. 23, 7:30 p.m. The reading is free. Contact 274-8929 for further information.