Eric Gansworth author page

Eric Gansworth biography

Eric Gansworth is a writer and visual artist who is an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation and was raised at the Tuscarora Nation in western New York. His work spans young adult fiction, poetry, memoir, visual art, and fiction for adults. He is also a professor of English at Canisius University, where he teaches creative writing and literature and serves as a co-director of the university’s creative writing program.

Gansworth’s young adult novels include If I Ever Get Out of Here, published by Arthur A. Levine Books in 2013, and Give Me Some Truth, published by the same imprint in 2018. If I Ever Get Out of Here received a 2014 American Indian Youth Literature Award Honor in the young adult category. His later novel My Good Man, published by Levine Querido in 2022, follows a young Indigenous newspaper reporter whose investigation of an assault leads him back through friendships and experiences from his childhood on the Tuscarora Reservation.

His 2020 book Apple (Skin to the Core), published by Levine Querido, combines memoir, verse, and Gansworth’s own artwork. It examines his family history, his experiences growing up at the Tuscarora Nation, and the effects of government boarding schools on Native families. The book was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, named a 2021 Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and won the 2022 American Indian Youth Literature Award for Young Adult Book.

Gansworth has also contributed to young adult anthologies. His work appears in All the Love Under the Vast Sky, published in 2025, and Legendary Frybread Drive-In: Intertribal Stories, published by Heartdrum in August 2025. The latter anthology received the 2026 Michael L. Printz Award.