Gregg's profile
Gregg Wilhelm is a literary artist, educator, community builder, and arts advocate.
His fiction, poems, and essays have appeared in Baltimore Magazine, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle, Smile, Hon, You’re in Baltimore, Broadkill Review, Tampa Review Online, Baltimore City Paper, Johns Hopkins Magazine, and elsewhere. He is co-editor of Clash by Night, a poetry anthology inspired by the Clash’s seminal “London Calling” album. Regardless of the form, "place" plays a central role in his literary art. Wallace Stegner asserted that it is “people experiencing and shaping a place that makes a place a 'place.’” Gregg's writing lives in these spaces, the tensions between character and setting, the desire to flee and the compulsion to return.
Few places contain such wild diversity from Appalachia to estuary, such north-to-south sensibilities, in just a sweep of 300 miles. His art resides here in Maryland where readers can discover "America in Literature."
In 2004, Gregg founded CityLit Project, which continues to serve readers and writers in the Baltimore metropolitan region today. Through the CityLit Festival, CityLit Stage at Baltimore Book Festival, CityLit Teens, CityLit Studios, the CityLit Press publishing imprint, and scores of other initiatives, the organization is a cornerstone of Baltimore’s literary community. It has featured hundreds of authors and poets to thousands of program attendees for two decades.
Gregg’s expertise covers book publishing, arts administration, and higher education. He started his career at Johns Hopkins University Press, then launched three Baltimore-based imprints including one with a major independent bookseller. As an independent publisher, he has shepherded to print more than 300 books across all genres and has served as a professor-mentor to students at Apprentice House Press and Stillhouse Press (“teaching presses” based at Loyola University Maryland and George Mason University, respectively).
Gregg has sat on grant review panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the RUBYs Artist Grants. He has served on Poet Laureate review committees for the State of Maryland and Fairfax County (VA). He is a recipient of both a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award and a RUBYs Artist Grant.
Gregg is an associate professor of English at George Mason University where he has been Director of the undergraduate BFA in Creative Writing and graduate MFA in Creative Writing programs since 2018. In 2020, he co-founded Watershed Lit: Center for Literary Engagement and Publishing Practice at Mason. Watershed Lit is a collective of organizations whose missions create and promote transformative experiences in the literary arts at Mason and beyond. Together, these entities seek to inspire a love of the written word in all its forms, foster the professional development of writers, teachers, and future literary leaders, and provide a platform for new and unheard voices.
He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tampa and earned degrees from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Loyola University Maryland, and St. Mary’s Seminary and University.
