Gary Lawless

Gary Lawless (born 1951) is an American poet and businessperson from Maine. He has written and published several collections of poems, and has owned Gulf of Maine Books, in Brunswick, Maine, since 1979.

Early life Lawless was born in 1951 in Belfast, Maine, to Richard "Jake" Lawless and Ruth Dow. Growing up, he got to know "local eccentric", poet Bern Porter. where he met writers and political activists such as Jerry Brown and Daniel Ellsberg. Lawless became co-founder (with his now-wife) of Gulf of Maine Books, a bookstore on Maine Street in Brunswick, Maine. He also established Blackberry Books, a publishing company. and then at Cook's Corner. It was at the first location where his manager, poet James Koller,

In 2017, Lawless was awarded the Constance H. Carlson Public Humanities Prize, the Maine Humanities Council's top honor, for his work in "bringing poetry and the creative process to the people of Maine, his commitment to helping Mainers of every background find their voice, and his ardent devotion to the environment and to all those that inhabit it." Full Flower Moon (1975) Gulf of Maine: A Blackberry Reader (1977) Poems for the Wild Earth (1994) In Ruins (2002) Caribou Planet (2015) How the Stones Came to Venice (2021) He also edited and published Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki's collected poems Let's Eat Stars (1997) and How to Live in the Planet Earth (2013). They was published on Lawless's Blackberry Books.