Thomas Gardner was born in Indiana, raised in New Jersey and Western Maryland, and now lives and teaches in Blacksburg, Virginia, on the edge of the Jefferson National Forest. He attended Bucknell University, where he ran cross country and track, then earned graduate degrees from Syracuse and Wisconsin. His most recent books are A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson (Oxford, 2006) and John in the Company of Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination (Baylor, 2011). His play "Eurydice" was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2006. He has been a professor of English at Virginia Tech since 1982, and he still regularly competes as a runner.