Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell is the author of three books of fiction, most recentlySmall Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His first novel, What Belongs to You, won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book, Cleanness, was a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for several awards, including the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, and France’s Prix Sade. It was named a Best Book of 2020 by The New Yorker, Time, The Washington Post, and over thirty other publications. His books have been translated into more than fifteen languages. 

With R.O. Kwon, Greenwell co-edited the anthology Kink: Stories, a New York Times Notable Book and National Bestseller. With Idra Novey, he is the co-translator of Luis Muñoz's One Moment, published by Washington Square Press in 2026.

Greenwell’s short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. His writing on literature, art, and music appears widely, including in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Yale Review, and elsewhere; he also writes the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. A collection of his essays is forthcoming. He has taught at Princeton University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Grinnell College, and the University of Mississippi, where he was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence. Most recently, he spent three years as a Distinguished Writer in Residence in the graduate creative writing program at New York University. He frequently offers classes on close reading and craft online.

A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Vursell Award for exceptional prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Greenwell lives in Iowa City.