A native of Sweden, Gunilla Theander Kester, Ph.D., is the author of one chapbook Time of Sand and Teeth, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, as part of its New Women’s Voices Series.

Her poem “In My Home Town Martin Luther is Still King” was a Finalist in New Millennium Writing 2008; “Shiri’s Piano” won an International Publishers Prize from Atlanta Review and was published in its International Issue, October 2008, distributed in over 120 countries. In 2006, her poem “Day Dream” won “Special Recognition,” In Other Words.

Her full-length poetry manuscript The Mountain; Grieving for Harmony was a Finalist in the Colorado Prize for Poetry 2005. Recently, she has won the Gival Press Tri-Language Poetry Competition, been a Finalist in The Glimmer Train Open and had poems appear in The Buffalo News, Radiance, Step, Not Just Air, and Oberon.  She has poems in Waging Words for Peace; Buffalo Poets Against War (ed. by Chuck Culhane), Poetic Voices Without Borders (ed. by Robert L. Giron) and forthcoming in Poetic Voices Without Borders, II.

She has published many poems in Swedish anthologies and magazines, including Bonniers Litterära Magasin, Sweden’s most prestigious literary magazine.

An accomplished guitarist, she often performs and also teaches classical guitar at The Amherst School of Music and at The Amherst School of Guitar. 

A Fulbright scholar, she authored a scholarly study entitled Writing the Subject: Bildung and the African American Text (New York: Peter Lang, 1995, 2nd ed. 1997). Her CD with Cantor Susan Wehle was released in 2006.

She is a board member of the Blue Rose Foundation and a member of APWW, SWEA, and Hadassah. She serves as Vice President for the Buffalo Guitar Society. She lives in Buffalo with her husband Daniel and her daughters, Anya and Shiri, and her fabulous four-footed friend and adoring fan, Lily.