Miriam Bird Greenberg

Miriam Bird Greenberg, headshot

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Bio: 

Miriam Bird Greenberg (they/she) teaches College Writing R1A and 134 (The Craft of Poetry). A poet and occasional essayist with a fieldwork-derived practice, Miriam is the author of In the Volcano’s Mouth, winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, about the contemporary nomads, hitchhikers, and hobos living on America's margins, and their own experiences living and traveling in those worlds. They're currently at work on a hybrid-genre manuscript about the economic migrants and asylum seekers of Hong Kong's Chungking Mansions.

A high school dropout and former hitchhiker, Miriam holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, among others. Recently the 2021 Poet-in-Residence at Westminster College and Cornell College's 2020 Distinguished Visiting Writer, Miriam has also taught poetry and poetics at the National University of Singapore, and at Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow.

Their limited-edition letterpress artist book The Other World won the Center for Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Fellowship and was published by the New York City Center for Book Arts in 2019. Miriam is also author of All night in the new country (Sixteen Rivers Press) and Pact-Blood, Fever Grass (Ricochet Editions); their poetry has also appeared in Granta, Poetry, and the Kenyon Review. They lives in Berkeley, where for many years they collaboratively developed site-specific performances for very small audiences.

Publications & Presentations: 

Books

  • In the Volcano’s Mouth (University of Pittsburgh, 2016)

Chapbooks

  • All night in the new country (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013)
  • Pact-Blood, Fevergrass (Ricochet Editions, 2013)

Small Editions/Artist Books

  • The Other World (Center for Book Arts, 2019)

Selected & Recent Poetry in Journals

  • Ecotone: “Here let me stand. Let me too look at the fog a little...” (2022).
  • Kenyon Review: “Of Exile” (2021).
  • jubilat, “Invocation [‘Oh, en « unordinary » ’]” (2021).
  • Gulf Coast, “Of Fennel & Kintsugi” (Winter/Spring 2020): online.
  • Kenyon Review: Online, “A Heron’s Age,” “Of Sparrows” (February 2020): online.
  • Poetry Magazine, “ · [Whole towns like • horses turnt loose in the bardo of • …]” (December 2019).
  • Anomaly ‘Queering in Plain Sight’ folio, “ · [We dressed our « unseemly » selves in meadow…],” “ · [In the old days and unemployed, I’d idle in the alley…],” “Of Glamour,” “Of Mereism” (Dec 2019).
  • Witness, “Of Kampong & Creekbank” (December 2019).
  • Cincinnati Review, “Of Mneme” (December 2019).
  • The Adroit Journal, “ · [In the good old days I lived « not » in a house…]” and “ · [To know a thing is to desire it, as Esau’s hide-…]” (July 2019): online.
  • The Baffler, “ · [I, in – in the long ago time before time began to be…]” and “ · [In the other world, I’m told, I was born / meant /…]” (June 2019).
  • Poetry Magazine, “ · [In the other world we use other words, painting…]” (March 2019).
  • Granta, “Of Arcadia” and “Of Leather” (November 2018): online.
  • Cha: An Asian Literary Journal: “South from Kunming…” and “Down the mountain to NanSha…”(from “Of the Tea-Horse Road”; March 2018): online.
  • Hunger Mountain, “Of Inheritance” and “Names to Disguise the Dead” (spring 2018).
  • The Baffler, “After I Die” (summer 2016).
  • Lambda Literary Spotlight, “Crossing the Bridge” (May 11, 2016): online.
  • Missouri Review: Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize Finalists’ Feature, “Would You Believe,” “Ophidia,” “Valediction,” and “A Thousand Wires Humming,” (summer 2015).
  • Colorado Review, “Killing” (winter 2014).

Selected Grants, Fellowships, & Awards

  • Artist in Residence, Willapa Bay AiR, Oysterville, WA (2021)
  • Dobie Paisano Fellowship (Ralph Johnston Fellow), University of Texas, Austin, TX (2019).
  • Writer-in-Residence, Jan Michalski Foundation, Montricher, Switzerland (2018).
  • Writer-in-Residence/Visiting Fellow, Singapore Creative Writing Residency, National University of Singapore & The Arts House (2017-2018).
  • Grant, John Anson Kittredge Fund ($10,000 to support fieldwork in Hong Kong; 2016).
  • Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, University of Pittsburgh Press, (for In the Volcano’s Mouth; 2015).
  • Fellowship, The Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, NY (2014).
  • National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry (2013).
  • Winter Fellowship, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA (2012-2013).
  • Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, Stanford University, Stanford, CA  (2010-2012).
  • Ruth Lilly Fellowship in Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, Chicago, IL (2010).
  • Artist in Residence, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2009).
  • Work-Study Scholar (“waitership”), Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Ripton, VT (2008).
  • Artist in Residence, Blue Mountain Center for Arts, Indian Lake, NY (2008).
Role: 
Faculty
Summer Creative Writing