Garth Greenwell (born March 19, 1978) is a poet, author, literary critic, and educator. His debut novel, What Belongs to You was published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in January 2016 and in the UK by Picador in April. What Belongs to You has been called the "first great novel of 2016" by Publishers Weekly. In 2013, Greenwell returned to the United States after living in Bulgaria to attend the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop as an Arts Fellow. He has published stories in The Paris Review and A Public Space and writes criticism for The New Yorker and The Atlantic.
Greenwell read from What Belongs to You on his US book tour January - April 2016.
Garth Greenwell was born in Louisville, Kentucky on March 19, 1978 and graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan, in 1996. He studied at the Eastman School of Music and received a BA 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 began Ph.D. coursework there.
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 Debut Fiction Award as well as the Lambda Award. His work has appeared in Yale Review, Boston Review, Salmagundi, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Poetry International, among others.
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.
In its article, "Of LGBT, Life and Literature," 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.