Gary Fincke's poetry collections have won prizes from Ohio State, Arkansas, Michigan State, Stephen F. Austin, and Jacar Press. Individual poems have received the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, been reprinted twice by Harper's, and been selected for a Pushcart Prize. His books in other genres have won the Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction, the Elixir Press Fiction Prize, and the 2017 Robert C. Jones Prize for Nonfiction. Since 1984, he has published forty books of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, including a novel-in-stories How Blasphemy Sounds to God and the memoir Amp'd: A Father's Backstage Pass, an account of immersing himself in his younger son's life as the lead guitarist of the platinum-selling rock band Breaking Benjamin. He is the Emeritus Charles Degenstein Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University, where he founded and then directed, for more than twenty years, the Writers Institute and the nationally recognized undergraduate creative writing major.