Dale Peck

Dale Peck (born 1967) is an American novelist, critic, and columnist. His 2009 novel, Sprout, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Children's/Young Adult literature, and was a finalist for the Stonewall Book Award in the Children's and Young Adult Literature category.

Life and career

Peck was born on Long Island, New York. He was raised in Kansas and attended Drew University in New Jersey, graduating in 1989. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995. He currently teaches creative writing at The New School in New York City. He is openly gay.

Peck's first novel, Martin and John, was published in 1993. His subsequent work, which continued to explore issues of identity and sexuality, were met with more mixed reviews. Salon.com described Now It's Time to Say Goodbye as a "hyperpotboiler" with a plot "both sensational and preposterous".The New York Review of Books called Martin and John "surprisingly sophisticated", but said Now It's Time to Say Goodbye "collapsed under the weight of its overladen allegorical structures" and diagnosed Peck's fiction as a "seesaw between a strained "'lyricism' ... and cliché".