
Photo by Stuart Dischell
Jeffrey Greene is the author of five collections of poetry, a memoir, four personalized nature books, and a book of mixed genre writing. His writing has been supported by the NEA, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and Rinehart Fund, and he was a winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize, the Randall Jarrell Award, and the “Discovery”/ The Nation Award. His poems, short stories, and essays have appeared numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review Online, Agni, Southwest Review and the anthologies Strangers in Paris, Intimacy, and Nothing to Declare: A Guide to Flash Sequence. He mentors for the Pan European MFA program.
New Book:
Forests and Stringed Instruments
[T]his concise book offers a pleasing deep dive into an intriguing niche topic. A good choice for connoisseurs who appreciate musical instruments the way others do fine wine.
– Kirkus
Jeffrey Greene takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the forests of Europe and with every page richly uncovers the mysteries held within the tonewood of the finest stringed instruments ever made.
– Jeffrey Ziegler, award-winning cellist and member of the Kronos Quartet, The New School

Nature Writing

Mr. Greene’s descriptions have the clarity one would expect from a poet, whether sketching the striped young boars, called marcassins, playing rough and tumble while looked over by the older sows, or recounting an old boar’s happy mud bath. . . . A fascinating portrait of rural France and its cherished rites emerges as Mr. Greene negotiates the intricacies of la France profonde.
“Interesting gem of a book. ” Kris Boyd, THINK” –KERA Dallas, NPR affiliate

Jeffrey Greene is on a quest to see value where the rest of the world sees weeds….. his book is a meditation, with elegant musings…. You leave Mr. Greene’s book wanting to find joy in fewer, more tangible things…. As you make your way through his ‘meditation’ you realize this sentiment is not just an aspiration for life, but as Thoreau pointed out, an inevitability for all living things.
Jeffrey Greene is a wise and generous writer, navigating each wild edible through his own memories. What results is much more than a field guide; it’s a window into our relationship with the natural world. — Dan Barber
Forget farm to plate. This is a book about wild places to plate, imagination to plate, memory to plate. — Michael P. Branch

Memoir

“Jeffrey Greene writes of France, and indeed the spirits of France with intimacy, elegance, and wit, and with apparently effortless evocation of a born writer.”
–W.S. Merwin
William Morrow (US/Canada); HarperCollins (Australia/New Zealand); Prometheus/Bert Bakker (Holland); HarperPerennial (US/Canada); Transworld/Bantam (UK); BBArt (Czech Rep.); Varrak (Estonia).
Poetry

—Cecilia Woloch


Randall Jarrell’s sense of the spaciousness and challenge of the American narrative is well honored here. This ambitious, questing poem is in ten parts. It’s purpose, to use the poet’s words from the second section, is to touch “the many planes of reality”. . . . I admired this poem particularly because sequences are never easy to write. They require the clearest sort of palette, the most confident brush strokes. And – to press the likeness a little – this is a very large canvas. Not just in the use of language, from Manhattan to Texas, but also in its changes of tone, its shifts of imagery and interference. Nevertheless, these are beautifully managed sections, full of swift and daring changes. But gradually the voice unfolds a portrait of both place and nation and, with it, a beautiful muted elegy for all the ironies and distances we have made of our own lives. For all the ways we betray ourselves–Eavan Boland.

National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

—Edward Hirsch

[I]n Shades of the Other Shore, two Americans, a poet and an artist respectively, are “translated” from the United States to rural France, with Jeffrey Greene’s short prose pieces and poems exploring “imagined correspondences between personal and historical ghosts tied to the seasons”, and Ralph Petty’s watercolours recording a journey to the source of a local river.
Contact: j.greene@orange. fr
Agent: Laura Strachan: lhstrachan@strachanlit.com