Gary Garrison has three children and six grandchildren, and has earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Alberta. He was Editor of Alberta Hansard, coordinated a prison visitation program at Edmonton Institution (The Max), and is an active member of Edmonton’s literary community as a poet and nonfiction writer.

In his novel, Human on the Inside, Gary Garrison takes readers out of their comfort zones and into "The Max," one of Canada’s most notorious and violent prisons, introducing us to a menacing yet vibrant subculture of inmates, guards, and staff. Through personal stories, Garrison illuminates a criminal justice system that ignores poverty, racism, mental illness, and addiction and deals instead with society's problems with razor wire and harsh treatment. It is a system that degrades the individual and sees inmates as less than human.  

His latest novel, Raising Grandkids, focuses on “skipped generation” families or grandparent-headed households. Collecting together stories from other grandparents and reflecting on his own experience as a caregiver to his step-grandchildren, Gary Garrison paints a compassionate yet compelling picture of the joys, fears, and passions that drive some grandparents to put their later lives on hold to raise their children’s children.