About
Gary Scott Enns grew up as a Mennonite Brethren farm kid surrounded by grapevines and peach trees in the Central San Joaquin Valley of California. He attended a Mennonite high school before leaping into the cultural milieu of university life and travel. He started practicing Soto Zen in his forties and was ordained as a Zen monk and later a teacher in the Deshimaru lineage.
As a creative writer, Enns frequently draws upon his rural and semi-rural life and experiences as husband, father, neighbor, and teacher to tell mostly fictional stories about the kinds of people he meets on a daily basis—bike mechanics, bodhisattvas, Mennonites, farmhands, punks, fairground carnies, and push truck drivers of the San Joaquin, all simply trying to live their lives with grace, love, and justice in the midst of their own personal chaos.
Enns received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from California State University, Fresno. He is professor and chairperson of the English and Foreign Languages Department at Cerro Coso College.
His stories and poems have appeared in Granta, Crazyhorse, The Missouri Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Wayfarer, and many other literary journals.
He currently resides with his family in Bakersfield, within earshot of Buck Owens’ famous Crystal Palace.
