Hank Garfield, also known as Henry Garfield, is originally from Philadelphia but moved with his family to Blue Hill, Maine at the age of ten. His first writing job was as a reporter for the Ellsworth bureau of the Bangor Daily News. In 1983, he moved to Southern California, where he remained until relocating to Belfast, Maine in 1999. Save for a recent year in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, he has been a Bangor resident since 2006, living within walking distance of downtown.
As Henry Garfield, he has published five novels, including: Moondog, Room 13, Tartabull’s Throw (the Moondog trilogy) and, for young adult readers, The Lost Voyage of John Cabot and My Father the Werewolf. He served as curator for the Maine Limerick Project, which published a slim volume of bawdy verse, Wicked Maine Limericks.
His writing has appeared in San Diego Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Downeast, Bangor Metro, and many other magazines and newspapers. His as-yet unpublished novels include a follow-up to Moondog set during Covid-19, and a long novel he characterizes as “a sprawling family saga.” A comic novella, Quest for Beer, takes place at the dawn of agriculture.
He is a great-great grandson of James A. Garfield, the last US president born in a log cabin, and the only president credited with an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. He has two grown children, a daughter and a son.
Hank decided to give up owning cars when he began teaching at the University of Maine and discovered that he could get to work easily by bus and/or bicycle. He plays guitar left-handed, and before the Plague could sometimes be spotted playing and singing at local venues. In the summer he likes to explore the Maine Coast on his small sailboat, named Planet Waves after a Bob Dylan album. The dinghy is called Desolation Row.
