BIO

Gabriel Packard is the author of The Painted Ocean: A Novel, published by Corsair/Little, Brown. He is also the associate director of the Hunter College MFA Program, in New York City, one of the most selective MFAs the in U.S.. He has taught one-off creative-writing seminars at universities throughout the U.S. and U.K., including Cornell, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Wellesley, U. Penn, Oxford and Cambridge, and his journalism has appeared in dozens of publications worldwide, including Poets & Writers, The Village Voice and New York Magazine. 

Gabriel has worked as a researcher for the novelists E.L. Doctorow, Peter Carey and Jonathan Franzen. He was nominated for a New American Voices Award and is the recipient of a K. Blundell Trust Award from the British Academy of Authors, a Hertog Fellowship and the Miriam Weinberg Richter Award. He was also the editor of the boutique publication With a Little Help From Our Friends, an anthology of creative writing that contains work extract of published work personally selected by thirty-six writers, including Salman Rushdie, Sharon Olds, Junot Diaz, Deborah Eisenberg and Michael Cunningham.

After graduating from Oxford University with a B.A. in English, Gabriel moved to New York City where he began his career as an editor and freelance reporter. For a while he wrote a digest of news about Africa, which appeared in newspapers across the U.S. One article from this digest was cited as evidence in the United Nations’ Rwandan war crime tribunal. He lives in New York City.