Born into a Norwegian-American community in Minnesota, Gabriel Gudding's first book, A Defense of Poetry, was published by the University of Pittsburgh in November of 2002.

A 2000 graduate of the writing program at Cornell University, he's an assistant professor of English at Illinois State University, where he was hired in 2002 to teach experimental poetry and literature.

Since 2002 he has made roughly 30 roundtrip journeys by car between Normal, Illinois, where he lives, and Providence, Rhode Island, an 1,100 mile trip one way. By placing a large format sketchpad on the passenger seat of his Toyota, he manages to write a book as he drives. He calls it Rhode Island Notebook.

He has started 2 creative writing programs in prisons and is looking to start another program in the maximum security facility in Pontiac, Illinois soon.

A recipient of several national awards, his work appears principally in American journals: eg, New American Writing; The American Poetry Review; Fence; Jacket; The Nation; CONDUIT; Mandorla: Nueva Escritura de Las Americas; Lit; Sentence; and in such anthologies as Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner 2003), Poetry 30: Thirtysomething American Thirtysomething Poets (Mammoth 2004), and others.