About

Miriam Bird Greenberg is a poet, educator, and occasional essayist with a fieldwork-derived practice.

Miriam's work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. The author of In the Volcano’s Mouth (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, Miriam grew up on an organic farm in rural Texas as the child of an uprooted Bronx Jew and a goat-raising anthropologist involved in the back-to-the-land movement.

Miriam has written written about the contemporary nomads, hitchhikers, and hobos living on America's margins, and prior to the pandemic was at work on a fieldwork-driven, hybrid-genre book about the economic migrants and asylum seekers of Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions and beyond – which, by now, has metamorphosed into something more broadly about dislocation and disembodiment. A high school dropout and former hitchhiker, Miriam has crossed the continent by thumb and aboard freight trains, and bicycled thousands of miles across North America, China, and Southeast Asia.

Also the author of the chapbooks All night in the new country (Sixteen Rivers, 2013) and Pact-Blood, Fever Grass (Ricochet Editions, 2013), Miriam’s limited-edition artist book The Other World (Center for Book Arts, 2019) won the Letterpress Chapbook Prize. Miriam is the former poetry editor of The Dodge (previously Artful Dodge), a journal of eco-writing and translation, and a reviewer for Anthropology & Humanism, the journal of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Miriam has taught poetry and poetics at Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow; as a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College (the one in Iowa founded by a cousin of the guy who founded the Cornell you've heard of); Westminster College in Utah; and at the National University of Singapore as The Arts House’s Singapore Writer-in-Residence. Miriam teaches academic and creative writing at the University of California – Berkeley and is a proud member of UC-AFT.

Lagniappe

• Taught creative writing to children in Bangkok and Shanghai via the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies program; ESL (and how to use a laser cutter) to graduate landscape architects and undergrad jewelry designers at a disreputable art college in San Francisco; and EFL to public high school students in inaka Japan many years earlier.

• Before and in between, worked in libraries and as a census enumerator (second-favorite job ever), deckhanded on sailboats (first-favorite job), and was once a mediocre unix sysadmin in the pre-y2k era (but pretty good at technical writing and QA).

• Subscribes to Jack Halberstam’s theory of queer temporality and uses they/she pronouns, but wishes ze/zir would catch on already.

• Biked from Palm Springs, CA, to El Paso, TX; Vancouver, BC to Portland via the Olympic Peninsula; Bangkok to Yangon in the halcyon days before the catastrophic 2021 military coup; Kunming to the border of Laos in southern Yunnan; in a big circle around southern Vietnam (from Ho Chi Minh City to Dalat and down to the coast); around Northern California and the Sierra foothills; and across Iowa in the company of ten thousand or so sunburnt strangers during RAGBRAI 2024. Is nonetheless very lazy despite the evidence seeming to indicate otherwise.

• Collaboratively developed audience-immersive performances in Austin, the SF Bay Area, and New York with the performance group Odyssey Works from 2007-2012. (Which also included the production of If on A Summer’s Day A Traveler, the alleged sequel to Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler.) Began college majoring in ceramics and would have gone to art school in another life.

• Believes emphatically in Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination, and in the ethical imperative of a firmly antizionist, diasporic Judaism.

• Has lived in (and served on the board of directors of) housing co-ops for over a dozen years. (If there’s anything that’s made me more conservative in my old age, it’s the practice of horizontalism.)

• An extra in the last episode of David Simon’s Treme. Can find four-leaf clovers.