Gardner McFall was born in Jacksonville, Florida. She holds a bachelor's degree from Wheaton College (Massachusetts), a master's degree from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and a doctorate in English from New York University. She received the Missouri Review's Thomas McAfee Prize for poetry in 1987 and a "Discovery"/The Nation award in 1989, and her poetry has been published in Partisan Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House and in the anthology Contemporary Poetry of New England (2002). Author of the children's books Jonathan's Cloud (Harper & Row, 1986) and Naming the Animals (Viking, 1994), McFall teaches Children's Literature at Hunter College, in New York City. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter.