Creative Writing: T. Greenwood

T. Greenwood, whom we know as Tammy (MA English 1994), is the author of seven novels. Her latest, Grace, was published just this month. Her titles are evocative: Breathing Water, Nearer than the Sky, Undressing the Moon, The Hungry Season. Several of her books are set in her native Vermont, but This Glittering World draws on her time in Flagstaff. Reviewers echo each other in praising her work, calling it lyrical, haunting, delicate, poignant, vivid, and “painfully beautiful.”

Greenwood has received grants from the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, Christopher Isherwood Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Maryland State Arts Council. Her novel Two Rivers was named Best General Fiction Book at the San Diego Book Awards two years ago, and five of her novels have been BookSense76/IndieBound picks. She teaches creative writing at both University of California-San Diego’s Extension Program and The Ink Spot. She is also an accomplished photographer, trying, as she does with words, to capture and preserve the extraordinary beauty of small, ordinary moments.

"I cherish the time I spent as a graduate student at NAU," Greenwood says. "My professors were dedicated, passionate teachers as well as writers, available and encouraging both during my time there and long after graduation. I am also still very close to many of the friends I made in the program; Jim Ruland, one of my former classmates, is now one of my writing partners. The years I spent as a student at NAU had a magical quality; they were the years during which I really began to see myself as a writer."