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 an Associate Professor of English at the University of Hartford, in Hartford, Connecticut.Ben is the author of 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 a chapbook, The Auctioneer Bangs his Gavel, with Kent State University Press (2006). 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. A recipient of individual artist grants from the states of Ohio and Connecticut, he serves as Assistant Poetry Editor and regular book reviewer for the Antioch Review.Ben is also a distance runner and a vegetarian, and lives with a small, unnamed cat.