# Garth Greenwell

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), Cleanness (2020), and Small Rain (2024). He has also published stories in The Paris Review and A Public Space and writes criticism for The New Yorker and The Atlantic.
In 2013, Greenwell returned to the United States after living in Bulgaria to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop as an Arts Fellow.

## Early life

Garth Greenwell was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 19, 1978, in a family of tobacco farmers. When he was 14, his father discovered he was gay and kicked him out of the house. He graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan, in 1996. He studied voice at the Eastman School of Music, then transferred to earn a BA degree in Literature with a minor in Lesbian and Gay Studies from the State University of New York at Purchase in 2001, where he served as a contributing editor for In Posse Review and received the 2000 Grolier Poetry Prize. He received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, an MA in English and American Literature from Harvard University, and also spent three years on Ph.D. coursework there.

## Career

Greenwell taught English at Greenhills, a private high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria; the school is famous for being the oldest American educational institution outside the US. His frequent book reviews in the literary journal West Branch transitioned into a yearly column called "To a Green Thought: Garth Greenwell on Poetry."
Greenwell's first novella, Mitko, won the Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award as well as the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction. His work has appeared in The Yale Review, Boston Review, Salmagundi, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Poetry International, among others.
His debut novel, What Belongs to You, was called the "first great novel of 2016" by Publishers Weekly. His second novel, Cleanness, was published in January 2020 and well received by critics. Greenwell's third book, Small Rain, was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
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. He was the 2008 John Atherton Scholar for Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

## LGBT rights advocacy in Bulgaria

In its article "Of LGBT, Life and Literature," the English-language weekly newspaper The 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.
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."