David Gordon Brooks (born 12 January 1953 in Canberra) is an Australian poet, novelist, short-fiction writer and essayist.
His last year of high school was spent in Cleveland, Ohio, on an American Field Service scholarship.
Before leaving, he experienced an illness which kept him bed-bound for two months, a period he spent in intense reading of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, James Joyce and others who were formative to his writing life.
Amongst his fellow students were Alan Gould, Kevin Hart, Philip Mead and other poets of what is sometimes referred to as 'the Canberra school'.
With Gould, Brooks founded the Open Door Press, the publications of which were all hand-set and printed by hand-press.
Brooks married Alison Summers in 1975 and together they moved to Canada to pursue postgraduate work at the University of Toronto.
While in Canada, writing his PhD on the poetics of Pound's early cantos, he served as overseas editor for New Poetry and as a scout for the Literature Board of the Australia Council, helping to arrange Australian residencies for Michael Ondaatje, Galway Kinnell, Mark Strand and others.
His first collection of poetry, The Cold Front (1983), won the Ann Elder Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Prize.
– a period marked by the publication of the pioneering Poetry and Gender, which he edited with Brenda Walker – and in 1991 took up a lectureship in Australian Literature at the University of Sydney.
While generally regarded as a poet of the 'natural' world, he is often seen as a philosophical novelist, concerned in particular with the borders of and between ways of thinking and being.