Benjamin S. Grossberg

Originally from Far Rockaway, New York, Benjamin S. Grossberg was educated at Rutgers and the University of Houston. From 2000 to 2008, he worked at Antioch College in Ohio, where he purchased a small farm and planted the Granny Smith orchard for which his second book was named. He is currently Director of Creative Writing and a Professor of English at the University of Hartford, in Hartford, Connecticut.

Ben's collections of poetry include My Husband Would (University of Tampa, 2020), winner of the Connecticut Book Award; Space Traveler (University of Tampa, 2014); Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa, 2009), winner of the Tampa Review Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; and Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath (Ashland Poetry Press, 2007), winner of the Snyder Prize. He has also published three chapbooks, As Are Right Fit (Small Harbor, 2024), An Elegy (Jacar Press, 2016), and The Auctioneer Bangs his Gavel (Kent State University Press, 2006). He co-edited an anthology, The Poetry of Capital (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). And he wrote a novel, The Spring before Obergefell (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), which was selected by Percival Everett for the AWP Award Series James Alan McPherson Prize.

His poems have appeared widely, including in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and the magazines Paris Review, Southwest Review, New England Review, Missouri Review, and The Sun, and he has received individual artist grants from the states of Ohio and Connecticut.