USA Projects

Miriam Bird Greenberg 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, she spent her childhood roaming the nearby creeks and caved-in barns, playing dress-up in clothes left behind by ancestors a hundred years dead of diphtheria. She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University, and a 2010 Ruth Lilly Fellow. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, though she's also taught EFL in Japan, hitchhiked solo from Montana to Vermont, and flown kites in Tiananmen Square. She lives in Oakland, California, where she collaborates with the audience-immersive performance group Odyssey Works, teaches and tutors non-native English speakers, wild-ferments kraut, and is studying (slowly) bespoke shoemaking.