David Gansz Papers, 1979-2004 (MSS 678)

David Christopher Douglass Gansz was born May 3, 1960, in Morristown, New Jersey. He was raised in Philadelphia, where he attended the William Penn Charter School, learning to play guitar, sing, and sight-read music. The family then moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, when his father became Professor and Head of the Music Department at Guilford College. He returned north, however, graduating from Westtown Friends Boarding School, just outside Philadelphia, in 1978, writing his senior paper on the Surrealists.

Entering Bard College, he studied history with his advisor and mentor Leon Botstein. From 1980-1981, he was in residence at Trinity College, Oxford University. He was awarded the University Diploma in Theology with Merit from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1981.

Gansz then returned to Bard College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History in 1982, writing his senior thesis on "Art Under Akhenaten and Nefertiti." He remained at Bard's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, where he studied poetry with Robert Kelly, Gerrit Lansing, Jackson Mac Low, and prose with John Hawkes and William Gaddis. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing from Bard in 1986, his thesis being the book of poems entitled Animadversions (the first book of Millennial Scriptions).

From 1986-1993, he was Senior Contributing Editor of Notus: New Writing magazine. During these years he was in touch with many of the poets and writers associated with the Beats, the Black Mountain School, the Deep Image School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School, as well as contemporaries in the United Kingdom, and he corresponded with many of them regarding both their writings and his. Exchanges of particular note are those with friends and fellow poets including Robert Kelly, his mentor at Bard College.

Gansz was awarded an Individual Artist's Fellowship by the The Dutchess County Arts Council in Poughkeepsie, New York, for his book Sin Tactics (the second book of Millennial Scriptions) in 1987. He was an editor of scholarly book manuscripts at the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and worked in the University's music, fine arts, undergraduate, and graduate libraries. In 1993 he earned a MLS from the University of Michigan. From 1993-1995 he served as an assistant professor and first director of the new Allen Ginsberg Library at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

In 2000 Gansz published his poetic magnum opus, Millennial Scriptions: The Ashen Book of Logres, gathering all early composed poetry with recently published materials. From 2001-2005 he was assistant professor of English and director of the library at Wilmington College, a Quaker school in Wilmington, Ohio. During this time he was also editor of Educating for Peace and Social Justice (Wilmington College, 2002). In addition, he was founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Stone House Press (Devon, Pennsylvania), which published his articles "Quaker Education: What Is It?" and "The Sacred Mission of Quaker Education," both in 2004. Since 2005, he has served as Associate Vice President for Academic Information and Technology at Edison State Community College, Piqua, Ohio.