Miriam Bird Greenberg
Miriam Bird Greenberg
Miriam Bird Greenberg grew up on a farm in rural Texas and spent her childhood attempting to communicate with the ghosts who populated her family’s century-old homestead. She’s held fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Stanford University, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts (where she is a 2013 Literature Fellow). Greenberg lives in Berkeley, where she teaches English as a Second Language, though in the past she’s ridden freight trains across the United States and taught in the United States, Canada, and Japan.
A Thresher of Dust and Dreams: Miriam Bird Greenberg’s All Night in the New Country was reviewed by Mindy Kronenberg, in Weave Magazine
All night in the new country
Selected for Best New Poets 2014
July 2014: A piece by Miriam Bird Greenberg has been chosen for the Best New Poets 2014 collection. Her poem “Shortness of Breath,” which originally appeared in The Paris-American, will appear in this collection of fifty emerging poets, selected by Dorianne Laux. Best New Poets 2014 will be published in November 2014; to order, visit http://bestnewpoets.org/2014-edition/.
Winner of the 2012 Poets-Under-Forty Chapbook Contest, selected by Camille Dungy
“Some poems record our collective dreams; these collect our nightmares. Miriam Bird Greenberg’s All night in the new country documents a world where there is ‘No one / to learn your name and say it after the moon / rise,’ a world where the future is as ‘empty as a smile.’ Though there is heat in this collection, fire and friction, all the energy is directed toward basic survival. All hope is lost and even belief is corrupted. But each poem catalogs a truth both ravished and ravishing, with such stark and startling images that I could not put the pages down.” —Camille T. Dungy, author of Smith Blue