Garth Greenwell to Visit UVA as Rea Visiting Writer This October

We are delighted to welcome Garth Greenwell to the University of Virginia Creative Writing Program as our Rea Visiting Writer in October 2026.

Garth Greenwell is the author, most recently, of Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 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 of fiction, Cleanness, was a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for many 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 30 other publications. His books have been translated into more than fifteen languages. 

Greenwell’s writing on literature, art, and music appears widely, including in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Harper’s, 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.

This fall, UVA students and the broader Charlottesville community will have the opportunity to learn from and engage with a writer whose work is reshaping contemporary literature. We look forward to the conversations, insights, and creative inspiration his visit will bring.

Please join us in welcoming Garth Greenwell to UVA.

With gratitude to Elizabeth Rea and the Dungannon Foundation for making the Rea Visiting Writer program possible.