Gary Eldon Peter is the author of Oranges, winner of the Gold Medal for LGBTQ+ fiction in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Midwest Book Award, and a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His debut novel, The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen, won the Acheven Book Prize for Young Adult Fiction, the Minnesota Book Award, the Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Silver Award for Young Adult Fiction, the Whippoorwill Book Award for Rural Young Adult Literature, and was named one of the best book of 2022 by National Public Radio. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and has been performed on the public radio program Selected Shorts. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is a faculty member at the University of Minnesota.