On the Block with Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You. He is also the author of a novella, Mitko, which won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Debut Fiction Prize and a Lambda Award. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, he holds graduate degrees from Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow. His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, A Public Space, StoryQuarterly, and VICE. He lives in Iowa City, where he holds the Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Fellowship at the University of Iowa. He is a pretty brilliant guy with a strong sense of his purpose as a writer: a gay writer standing in a tradition and engaging in a dialogue that challenges our deepest understandings of our relationships to our own bodies, and through them, to the rest of the world. Here, we discuss his embracing of the label "queer" author, the intense privilege and responsibility of writing one of the first novels to normalize homosexuality in Bulgaria, and how he sees novels as a technology for readers to engage a individual consciousness. We were proud to have him on the show.