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Garth Greenwell

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Garth Greenwell
Born (1978-03-19) March 19, 1978 (age 46)
Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.
EducationInterlochen Arts Academy
Alma materState University of New York at Purchase (BA)
Washington University in St. Louis (MFA)
Harvard University (MA)
OccupationNovelist
Known forWhat Belongs to You
Cleanness
Small Rain

Garth Greenwell (born March 19, 1978) is an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and educator. He has published the novella Mitko (2011) and the novels What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020). He has also published stories in The Paris Review[1] and A Public Space and writes criticism for The New Yorker[2] and The Atlantic.[3]

In 2013, Greenwell returned to the United States after living in Bulgaria to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop as an Arts Fellow.[4][5]

Early life

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Garth Greenwell was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 19, 1978, in a family of tobacco farmers. When he was 14, his father discovered he was gay and kicked him out of the house.[6] He graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan, in 1996. He studied voice at the Eastman School of Music, then transferred to earn a BA degree in Literature with a minor in Lesbian and Gay Studies from the State University of New York at Purchase in 2001, where he served as a contributing editor for In Posse Review and received the 2000 Grolier Poetry Prize.[7][8] He received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, an MA in English and American Literature from Harvard University, and also spent three years on Ph.D. coursework there.[9]

Career

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Greenwell taught English at Greenhills, a private high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria; the school is famous for being the oldest American educational institution outside the US.[10] His frequent book reviews in the literary journal West Branch transitioned into a yearly column called "To a Green Thought: Garth Greenwell on Poetry."[11][12][13]

Greenwell's first novella, Mitko, won the Miami University Press Novella Prize[14] and was a finalist for the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award as well as the Lambda Award.[14] His work has appeared in Yale Review,[15] Boston Review,[16] Salmagundi, Michigan Quarterly Review,[17] and Poetry International, among others.

His debut novel, What Belongs to You, was called the "first great novel of 2016" by Publishers Weekly.[18] His second novel, Cleanness, was published in January 2020 and well received by critics.[19][20][21]

Greenwell has received the Grolier Prize, the Rella Lossy Award, an award from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, and the Bechtel Prize from the Teachers & Writers Collaborative.[22] He was the 2008 John Atherton Scholar for Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.[22]

LGBT rights advocacy in Bulgaria

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In its article "Of LGBT, Life and Literature," the English-language weekly newspaper Sofia Echo credits Greenwell's publications with bringing much needed attention to the LGBT experience in Bulgaria and to other English-speaking audiences through various broadcasts, interviews, blog posts, and reviews.[23]

In an interview with Literary Hub about the release of Kinks, he said about Grindr: "I want to argue for the value of those spaces existing as well. I would want to argue—again, with the understanding that there are lots of places for gay men to meet gay men, where nobody’s going to grab anyone’s crotch—that the kind of sociality that is possible in that atmosphere of permissiveness is really valuable. I would want to argue for places like that being able to exist."[24]

Bibliography

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Novels

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  • What Belongs to You. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2016.
  • What Belongs to You (U.K. ed.). Picador. 2016.
  • Cleanness. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020.
  • Small Rain. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2024.

Anthologies (edited)

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  • Kink, co-edited with R.O. Kwon. Simon & Schuster. 2021.

Short fiction

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Year Title[a] First published Reprinted/collected Notes
2011 Mitko Mitko. Miami University Press. 2011. Novella
2017 An Evening Out Greenwell, Garth (August 21, 2017). "An Evening Out". The New Yorker. Vol. 93, no. 24. pp. 62–69.
2018 The Frog King "The Frog King". The New Yorker. Vol. 94, no. 42. November 26, 2018. pp. 74–81.
2019 Harbor "Harbor". The New Yorker. September 16, 2019.

Essays and reporting

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Adaptations

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What Belongs to You was adapted as a 2021 opera by composer/librettist David T. Little. The premiere production was by Mark Morris, starring Karim Sulayman as the narrator, and conducted by Alan Pierson.[25]

Notes

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  1. ^ Short stories unless otherwise noted.
  2. ^ Discusses, among other things, the novel The end of Eddy by French author Édouard Louis. Online version is titled "Growing up poor and queer in a French village".

References

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  1. ^ Greenwell, Garth (2014-01-01). "Gospodar". Paris Review. No. 209. ISSN 0031-2037. Archived from the original on 2016-03-13. Retrieved 2016-03-24.
  2. ^ "Garth Greenwell". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 2016-03-10. Retrieved 2016-03-24.
  3. ^ Greenwell, Garth. "Garth Greenwell". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2016-03-24.
  4. ^ "Garth Greenwell". lighthousewriters.org. Retrieved June 10, 2024. Greenwell holds graduate degrees from Harvard University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. A native of Kentucky, Greenwell taught high school in Sofia, Bulgaria for four years before returning to the States. He is the 2018-19 John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He lives in Iowa City.
  5. ^ Morris, Lucy (January 20, 2016). "Iowa City author Garth Greenwell hopes to break the ice for queer writers working in Bulgaria". Retrieved June 10, 2024. Most profoundly, the experience of being gay in Bulgaria in 2009-2013 and the experience of teaching adolescents in Bulgaria and so talking to gay adolescents in Bulgaria, just kept throwing me back again and again to the early '90s in Kentucky when I was coming into awareness of myself as a gay person.
  6. ^ Interview on Private Passions, BBC Radio 3, 20 October 2024. “When I was 14 my father discovered I was gay and kicked me out of the house towards the end of the semester and I simply could not finish my work. My father said to me ‘if it’s true that you’re gay, you’re not welcome in my house and if I had known you would be a faggot, you would never have been born’.”
  7. ^ Greenwell, Garth. "Orpheus Sequence". In Pose Review. Archived from the original on May 21, 2021. Retrieved March 21, 2021.
  8. ^ "Table of contents". disquietingmuses. Archived from the original on April 22, 2017. Retrieved March 21, 2021.
  9. ^ Barone, Joshua (January 9, 2020). "Garth Greenwell Comes Clean". New York Times. p. C6. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on February 14, 2021. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
  10. ^ "Faculty". acs.bg. Archived from the original on 2016-03-13. Retrieved 2016-03-24.
  11. ^ "To a Green Thought: Garth Greenwell on Poetry" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-06-12. Retrieved 2011-12-11.
  12. ^ Greenwell, Garth. "The First Thing and the Last" and "Two Elegists" in West Branch.
  13. ^ "Teacher Garth Greenwell's New Poetry Column: To a Green Thought". Green Hill School. January 8, 2009. Archived from the original on April 5, 2012. Retrieved March 21, 2021.
  14. ^ a b "Miami University Press - Mitko". Archived from the original on 2012-04-06. Retrieved 2011-12-10.
  15. ^ Greenwell, Garth. 2010. "An Evening Out." The Yale Review, 92:2. "Yale Review | contributors". Archived from the original on 2010-06-06. Retrieved 2011-12-10.
  16. ^ Greenwell, Garth. "Facilitas" Archived 2011-11-07 at the Wayback Machine, Boston Review. December 2004/January 2005.
  17. ^ Greenwell, Garth (2008). "Likeness". Michigan Quarterly Review. 47 (4). hdl:2027/spo.act2080.0047.405. Retrieved March 21, 2021.
  18. ^ Habash, Gabe (2015-12-04). "Staff Pick: 'What Belongs to You' by Garth Greenwell". PublishersWeekly.com. Archived from the original on 2016-04-05. Retrieved 2016-03-24.
  19. ^ Garner, Dwight (2020-01-13). "Sex, Violence and Self-Discovery Collide in the Incandescent 'Cleanness'". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2020-01-15. Retrieved 2020-01-15.
  20. ^ Greenblatt, Leah (2020-01-14). "These gorgeous new novels explore sex with empathy, complexity, and radical honesty". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on 2020-01-15. Retrieved 2020-01-15.
  21. ^ Hermann, Nellie (2020-01-10). "Review: Garth Greenwell's 'Cleanness' thrums with life's questions". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 2020-01-15. Retrieved 2020-01-15.
  22. ^ a b "The Bechtel Prize: 2010 Winner and Finalists" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-11-08. Retrieved 2011-12-10.
  23. ^ "LGBT, Life and Literature." The Sofia Echo. June 17, 2011". Archived from the original on March 5, 2016. Retrieved December 10, 2011.
  24. ^ Sciallo, Andrew (24 June 2022). "Sex, Freedom, Cruising, and Consent: A Conversation with Garth Greenwell". Literary Hub. Archived from the original on March 28, 2023. Retrieved May 23, 2023.
  25. ^ "David T Little - What Belongs to You".
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