Born in Barstow, California, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia, where he and his two sisters were raised by their single mother, an elementary school teacher.

Gander's estranged father ran The Mod Scene, a bar on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, New York City.

[2] With his mother and sisters, Gander began to travel extensively on summer road trips around the United States.

[6] There, he met his late wife C. D. Wright, with whom he relocated to Mexico for a number of years before returning and settling on the East Coast.

[10] David Kirby, writing in The New York Times Book Review notes that, "It isn't long before the ethereal quality of these poems begins to remind you of similar effects in the work of T. S. Eliot and the 17th century Anglo-Welsh mystic Henry Vaughan....In the midst of such questioning, the only reality is the poet's unflinchingly curious mind.

"[13] With Australian poet-activist John Kinsella, Gander wrote the cross-genre book Redstart: an Ecological Poetics.

In 2008, New Directions published As a Friend, Gander's novel of a gifted man, a land surveyor, whose impact on those around him provokes an atmosphere of intense self-examination and eroticism.

In 2014, New Directions released Gander's second novel The Trace, about a couple who, researching the last journey of Civil War writer Ambrose Bierce, find themselves lost in the Chihuahua Desert.

"[17] In The Paris Review, Robyn Creswell commented "Gander's landscapes are lyrical and precise ("raw gashed mountains, gnarly buttes of andesite"), and his study of a marriage on the rocks is as empathetic as it is unsparing.

[19] With Kyoko Yoshida, Gander translated Spectacle & Pigsty: Selected Poems of Kiwao Nomura, winner of the 2012 Best Translated Book Award;[20] in 2016, New Directions published Alice Iris Red Horse, selected poems of Yoshimasu Gozo, edited by Gander.

With CD Wright, Gander was a co-editor of Lost Roads Publishers for twenty years, soliciting, editing, and publishing books by more than thirty writers, including Michael Harper, Kamau Brathwaite, Arthur Sze, Fanny Howe, Steve Stern, Josie Foo, Frances Mayes, and Zuleyka Benitez.