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]
Greenwell taught English at Greenhills, a private high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at the American College of SofiainBulgaria; the school is famous for being the oldest American educational institution outside the US.[9] His frequent book reviews in the literary journal West Branch transitioned into a yearly column called "To a Green Thought: Garth Greenwell on Poetry."[10][11][12]
His debut novel, What Belongs to You, was called the "first great novel of 2016" by Publishers Weekly.[17] His second novel, Cleanness, was published in January 2020 and well received by critics.[18][19][20]
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.[21] He was the 2008 John Atherton Scholar for Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.[21]
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.[22]
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."[23]
^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".
^Greenwell, Garth. "Garth Greenwell". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2016-03-24.
^"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.
^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.
^Greenwell, Garth. "Orpheus Sequence". In Pose Review. Archived from the original on May 21, 2021. Retrieved March 21, 2021.