History

As a brand-new literary review, we have no history—though founder Robin Greene does, so her history, shared here, begins ours—with one small but essential addition.

About Robin

Robin Greene is a former English and Writing professor and past director of a university writing center. In 1997, Robin, along with her husband and colleague Michael Colonnese, founded Longleaf Press, a university-based literary press that primarily published poetry chapbooks. Over the years, the press expanded, and when Robin and Michael left the university, the press became a nonprofit, guided by poet Shannon Ward, its new director. Currently, Robin reads for Longleaf Press and sits on its Board of Directors.

Robin is the author of five books: The Shelf Life of Fire (novel), Augustus: Narrative of a Slave Woman (novel), Real Birth, Women Share Their Stories (nonfiction and Amazon Kindle bestseller), Lateral Drift (poetry), and Memories of Light (poetry). She also regularly publishes essays, poems, and fiction in journals and magazines.

Robin has won a NEA/NC Arts Council co-sponsored individual fellowship in poetry, and she served as a board member of the North Carolina Writer’s Network. Robin is also a certified meditation teacher and a registered yoga teacher, who now teaches yoga as well as classes in poetry, nonfiction, and fiction—sometimes combining teaching yoga and writing.

For many years, Robin taught writing—and more recently adding yoga—for women’s residential retreats, both in Oaxaca, Mexico, as well as in North Carolina.

Originally from Queens and Long Island, New York, Robin lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina, with her husband. They have two grown sons, one of whom lives in Cambridge, MA, and the other who lives in Asheville, NC. Both sons are both married, and each has a daughter.

Robin has just completed a new novel, A Grammar of Unspeakable Things, and is now working on a new collection of poetry, Family Savasana.

One Small but Essential Addition 

In 2023, Robin held her first North Carolina women’s retreat at a lodge located on the property of The Light Center in Black Mountain. The Light Center, a seventies-inspired geodesic dome, was built on an ancient Cherokee sacred site, on top of ley lines, or magnetic “lines” with special energy. These ley lines, which can be physically felt in The Light Center, became an important hallmark of the retreat and later became the informal name of the group of women writers who participated in the retreat. Ley Lines Literary Review is named both in recognition and in honor of this group.