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 is at work on a hybrid-genre manuscript about the economic migrants and asylum seekers of Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions and beyond. 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 in 2019. Miriam is the poetry editor of the Dodge, a journal of eco-writing and translation (formerly Artful Dodge), and a reviewer for Anthropology & Humanisim, 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 (founded in Iowa 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 currently 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 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.

• Has also worked in libraries and as a census enumerator (second-favorite job ever), deckhanded on sailboats (first-favorite job), and was 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.

• Has biked from Palm Springs to El Paso; 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 a big circle around southern Vietnam; around Northern California and the foothills of the Sierras; and across Iowa in the company of ten thousand or so sunburnt strangers as part of RAGBRAI 2024 (but despite the sounds of it, is nonetheless very lazy).

• Collaboratively developed audience-immersive performances for nearly a decade with Odyssey Works in Austin, the San Francisco Bay Area, and New York. (Including 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.) Started college as a ceramics major; would have gone to art school in another life.

• Has lived in (and served on the board of directors of) housing co-ops for over a dozen years.

• Believes emphatically in Palestinian self-determination and in the ethical obligation of anti-zionism.