Gary Joseph Whitehead (born March 23, 1965, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island) is an American poet and educator.
His work has appeared in journals, magazines and newspapers and most notably in The New Yorker and Poetry.
His awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, a Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship at Iowa State University, the Anne Halley Prize from The Massachusetts Review, and a Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Teaching Award in 2003.
He has held artist residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Mesa Refuge, Marble House Project, and the Heinrich Böll cottage in Ireland.
In 2004, he was the recipient of the PEN Northwest Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency Award, and spent April though October, 2005 in a secluded cabin in the wilderness of southwestern Oregon.