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 books of poetry include My Husband Would (University of Tampa, 2020), winner of the Connecticut Book Award and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year; 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 two chapbooks, An Elegy (Jacar Press, 2016) and The Auctioneer Bangs his Gavel (Kent State University Press, 2006). A new chapbook is forthcoming from Small Harbor Press in 2024. He co-edited an anthology, The Poetry of Capital (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). And he wrote the novel, The Spring before Obergefell (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), selected by Percival Everett for the 2023 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, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, New England Review, and The Sun.

​

Ben is also a runner, vegetarian, and cat steward.