About, ET CETERA

Miriam Bird Greenberg is the author of In the Volcano's Mouth (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Poetry Foundation, she’s written about the nomads, hitchhikers, and hobos living on America’s margins and crossed the continent as a hitchhiker and aboard freight trains herself. The author of two chapbooks—All night in the new country (Sixteen Rivers, 2013) and Pact-Blood, Fevergrass (Ricochet Editions, 2013), Miriam grew up on an organic farm in rural Texas, the daughter of a New York Jew and a goat-raising anthropologist involved in the back-to-the-land movement. These days she lives in  the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches creative writing and ESL, helping jewelry students use laser cutters and architecture grad students make sense of building information systems. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she's taught at Stanford University and the National University of Singapore, led children's creative writing courses around the US, in Bangkok, and in Shanghai, and bicycled thousands of miles in the US, Canada, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, and China. She's currently at work on a fieldwork-derived manuscript about the economic migrants and asylum seekers of Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions. In 2018 she was a writer-in-residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Montricher, Switzerland.