Here’s the official version:

Arielle Greenberg is the author of the poetry collections My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005) and Given (Verse, 2002) and the chapbooks Shake Her (Dusie Kollektiv, 2009) and Farther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003). Her poems have been included the 2004 and 2005 editions of Best American Poetry and a number of other anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers (Sarabande, 2006), and she is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship and other awards. A translated volume of her selected poetry is out in German from LuxBooks. She is co-editor of three poetry anthologies: with Rachel Zucker, Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections, which centers around personal essays by young women poets on their living female mentors (Iowa, 2008) and Starting Today: Poems from Obama’s First 100 Days (Iowa, forthcoming 2010); and with Lara Glenum, Gurlesque, based on a theory Arielle originated (Saturnalia, 2009). She is also editing, with Becca Klaver, an anthology of contemporary poetry on girlhood aimed at teenage girls. Another scholarly interest is American subcultures and countercultures, and she is editor of a college reader, Youth Subcultures: Exploring Underground America (Longman, 2006). She is the poetry editor for the journal Black Clock, a founder and co-editor of the journal Court Green, and the founder-moderator of the poet-moms listserv. She is an Associate Professor in the poetry program at Columbia College Chicago and lives in Evanston, IL with her family.  She is spending 2009-2010 in Belfast, Maine working on an oral history of the new back-to-the-land movement.

And here’s the unabridged, chatty version:

I was born on October 24, 1972, in Columbus, Ohio. When I was seven, my family moved to Schenectady, in upstate New York, where my father was a professor at Union College. I’ve lived all over New York state-in Astoria and Long Island City, Queens (in NYC), in Westchester County, and in Central New York. I also lived in Haifa, Israel, in 1987 and ‘88, while my father was on sabbatical there.

I was raised in a Modern Orthodox but progressive and feminist Jewish family, and sent to parochial school from first to eighth grade. I have two younger sisters, D’vora (a visual artist; she designed the cover of my book and thus inspired the design of this web site) and Ravit (an activist).

I started undergraduate school as an English major at Binghamton University, then transferred to Purchase College (both are state schools in NY), where I focused on drama and film studies, made book art, and started publishing a pop culture zine, William Wants a Doll, the archives of which are now housed in the zine collection at the Sallie Bingham research center for girl culture at Duke University.

After college, I worked in New York City, first at a film museum, and then at a public relations firm that represented non-profit arts organizations. After five years in the working world, I headed back upstate, to graduate school, to pursue an MFA in poetry at Syracuse University, where I taught for three years. I was then a lecturer in English at Bentley College outside of Boston.

I’m now an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, a wonderful arts school in downtown Chicago, where I teach in the undergraduate and graduate poetry program. I live in Evanston, IL and spent a year and a half on leave in Midcoast Maine with my family: my husband Rob and my children Willa and Jem.