Garret Keizer

Biography

Garret Keizer is the author of ten books, including Getting Schooled (Metropolitan Books, 2014) and Privacy (Picador, 2012), and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His most recent book, Starting from Paterson (Eastover, 2026), is a wide-ranging collection of first-person essays.

See Work

ON BECOMING / Winter 2023

Pretty Much a Gift

By Garret Keizer ,  Illustration by Landis Blair

My sense of gratitude seems to have grown with time. I feel grateful about as often as I need to pee, which these days is a matter of minutes more than hours. 
ESSAYS / Fall 2019

What the Bear Doesn’t Know

By Garret Keizer ,  Illustration by Lorraine Nam

Our daughter talked early and walked late and was a lover of books even before she could talk. So it is not always easy to reconstruct the chronology of her enthusiasms for the stories we read to her and the make-believe they inspired...
ESSAYS / Winter 2017

Facing North

By Garret Keizer ,  Illustration by Stephen Doyle

The Perennial Pull of a Mysterious Direction
MEMOIR / Summer 2014

Reformed

By Garret Keizer

Like other children, I was fascinated by old Lucifer, by his horns and tail, which simultaneously made him sinister and gave him an animal’s grace, by his fire-​engine hide, his flame that no fire engine can put out, and above all by his...
ESSAYS / Fall 2013

Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone

By Garret Keizer

Once the fastest-​growing city in America and its fourth largest, the cradle of Motown music is now the country’s leader in urban decline. Its population peaked in 1950; since then, it has lost nine of ten manufacturing jobs and 63 percent...
MEMOIR / Summer 2013

Walt

By Garret Keizer

Not long after I fell in love with my wife, I fell in love with her father. I can’t say for sure if I loved him until after she and I were married, but I liked him from that very first night.