Kansas Author Event: Bryn Greenwood

Monday, October 18 | 6 PM

We are so excited to welcome Kansas Native Bryn Greenwood, New York Times Bestseller to Morrill Public Library. Thank you to the Friends of Morrill Public Library for sponsoring this event! Two of Bryn’s Books (All the Ugly and Wonderful Things and The Reckless Oath We Made) are available for checkout in either physical or digital format. To find out how to place a copy on hold, go to hiawathalibrary.org/your-next-account. All are welcome to this event!

From the “About Bryn” section on her website:

“I grew up on the mean streets of Hugoton, Kansas, where the only traffic light in town went to flashing red at dusk. Alright, the streets weren’t mean. They were gravel and named after presidents. Not even all the presidents, because Hugoton at the time was only ten blocks by ten blocks.

When I was little, my family often accused me of being a storyteller, which is a polite way in Kansas of calling someone a liar. Later I found out it really doesn’t matter whether something’s true, as long as it’s a good story. The first story I ever wrote in pre-school was a thinly veiled autobiography about a family of aliens. In the story’s illustrations my older sister looks suspiciously like the Great Gazoo from The Flintstones.

My mother was a teetotaler and my father was into a variety of recreational chemicals, so their marriage was probably doomed from the start. Over the years, we picked up my stepdad, my stepmom, and four more sisters, bringing the grand total of daughters to seven.

At fifteen, I didn’t so much drop out of high school to go to college as I ran away to escape the torments of prom and church youth groups.

Somewhere in there, I got a BA in French Literature, a BA in English, and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. Faced with the terrifying prospect of a PhD or reality, I chose reality.

At any rate, I chose to take a teaching job in Japan. I lived in Niigata Prefecture, where we got 45 feet of snow my first winter. After that I came home and wasted what were probably the prime years of my life demonstrating the correct way to put on a condom to high school students and a variety of social services audiences.

Since then I’ve been working in academia, both teaching and pushing papers. I got married, had kittens, got divorced, bought a project house, and rescued a pair of boxers. (The dogs, not the undergarments.)

In the last twenty years, I’ve written somewhere around a million words, and my thinly veiled autobiography would still be about aliens.”