Local Author - Gary Earl Ross

Novelist, playwright, public radio essayist, and popular culture scholar, Gary Earl Ross is a language arts professor at the University at Buffalo Educational Opportunity Center. Named Erie County's 2003 Artist of the Year, Ross has won numerous awards for writing and teaching, including a LIFT Fellowship for his fiction, an Emanuel Fried Outstanding New Play Award for his courtroom thriller Matter of Intent, an Excellence Award from United University Professions and State University of New York, and for his public radio essays first place commentary awards from the New York Associated Press and the New York Broadcasters' Association. In 2008 readers of the alternative newsweekly Artvoice voted him the Best Writer in Buffalo.

His books and staged plays include The Wheel of Desire and Other Intimate Hauntings (2000), Shimmerville: Tales Macabre and Curious (2002), Sleepwalker: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2002, Towne Players in Buffalo; 2007, Burnage School in Manchester, England; 2009, Shanghai Rego International School, China), the children's tale Dots (2002), Matter of Intent (2005, Ujima Theater Company in Buffalo), Picture Perfect (2007, Tennessee Stage Company, Knoxville), The Best Woman (2007, Ujima), Blackbird Rising: A Novel of the American Spirit (2009), Murder Squared (Ujima, 2010), and The Scavenger's Daughter.

In 2008, Ross edited Nickel City Nights: Erotic Writing in Western New York, and published the collection of prose and poetry through his website, The Writer's Den (www.garyearlross.com). In June 2009 his Edgar Award-winning play Matter of Intent received a staged reading at the Bridewell Theatre in London as part of the NAAA Festival. Also in 2009 he co-edited (with Gunilla Theander Kester) The Empty Chair: Love and Loss in the Wake of Flight 3407, which was published in 2010, on the first anniversary of the worst air disaster to occur in Western New York.

Ross is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, the Mystery Writers of America, and the Just Buffalo Literary Center. He is a past president of the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association (MAPACA, currently chairs its film and comics areas, and edits the MAPACA Almanack. Playwright-in-residence at the prestigious Ujima Company, he was awarded a 2008 Constance Saltonstall Foundation Playwriting Grant.

An avid reader, film buff, bicyclist, gamer, and occasional actor, Gary Earl Ross is the father of five adult children and lives in Buffalo, New York.