Gary L. Atkins is an award-winning journalist whose works include thecritically acclaimed Gay Seattle: Storiesof Exile and Belonging and his new book, Imagining Gay Paradise: Bali, Bangkok and Cyber-Singapore. Informationabout his new book can be found at: http://imagininggayparadise.com/. 

Gary specializes in creative non-fiction journalism, fusing aneasy-to-read narrative style powered by strong characters with questions about history,geography, communication, and social justice. Gay Seattle follows the 100-year-long saga through which gay menand women imagined their “coming home” – rather than just their “coming out” --in the context of the Pacific Northwest’s famously wet landscape and roguishhistory. Similarly, Imagining GayParadise journeys through a century of imaginings of paradise and manhood bygay men in the tropical geography of Southeast Asia. The story stretches fromthe end of the colonial empires to the present world of cyberspace, rangingacross the development of the aesthetic paradise of Bali in the 1920s and 1930sto the erotic paradise of Bangkok fostered from the 1960s onward, and to thecyber-paradise promoted since the 1990s in Singapore.  GaySeattle was published by the University of Washington Press in 2003 andreceived numerous accolades for its fusion of journalism and scholarship,including a Washington State Book Award and a national Jesuit Book Award.  The University of Hong Kong Press ispublishing the hardback edition of ImaginingGay Paradise and is joined by Silkworm Press of Thailand as co-publishersof the paperback edition. Imagining GayParadise is also being made available as an e-book.

Gary first became interested in writing about age six when his parentsgave him a rubber-type printing press.He immediately started producing a newspaper for his local neighborhood in NewOrleans. In high school, he initially thought he might become a historian or abiologist – two other strong interests – but eventually he realized that if he enteredjournalism, he could write about all three of his interests: current politicaland legal events, history, and nature. He graduated from Loyola University and thenStanford University, served an internship on the Washington Post and joined thePulitzer-winning Riverside Press-Enterprise in California -- where he wonnumerous awards for his narrative and environmental reporting and writing.

SeattleUniversity hired him to teach in and chair its Communication Department and, in2005, named him a full professor. He teaches courses in narrative journalism,communication justice, media and sexual/gender justice, and internationalcommunication in Asia.