Gom was born on an isolated farm in northern Alberta, she received her B.Ed.
[1] She has published six books of poetry and eight novels and has won both the Canadian Authors Association Award for her poetry collection Land of the Peace in 1980 and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for her novel Housebroken in 1986.
Her work has been included in many journals and over fifty anthologies, and five of her books have been translated into other languages.
Her novel The Y Chromosome has been optioned for a movie and has been used as a text in both women's studies and sociology courses in Canada and the U.S.
Quill & Quire calls it "an entertaining read, in which the quotidian world of marriage and the exotic field of astronomy mesh."