Greg’s book, The Bright Freight of Memory and Publisher, Koehler Books have been honored in the 2024 BREW Fiction Book Excellence Awards:
Overall Book of the Year & Literary Fiction of the Year
Publisher of the Year – Koehler Books
In the end I believe our flaws define us more than our virtues. Shakespeare’s greatest plays, the tragedies, revolved around their heroes’ flaws rather than their glories.
Matthew Cooney and Donal Mannion shared their time as boys in a rundown neighborhood, without fathers, without comfort, without a sense of tomorrow, then went their separate ways, one to chase the trappings of maturity, the other to the streets. Their days shrouded in boredom, their nights filled with the thrill of the chase, each sought his place and his purpose.
Within their struggles are the challenges of escape, of outrunning the roll of the dice that placed them where they are, and, in the end, of defining what it means to be alive, to constantly strive for the things that are just out of reach.
Greg Fields has established a reputation as an articulate voice of the human condition. He has won recognition for his written work in presenting the plight of marginalized young people through his tenure at the Global Fund for Children, and is the co-author with Maya Ajmera of Invisible Children: Reimagining International Development from the Grassroots, published by Palgrave Macmillan in July 2016. He has had articles published in the Harvard International Review, as well as numerous periodicals, including The Washington Post and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. He has presented at and participated in numerous symposia, including Stanford University’s Global Philanthropy Forum, The Conrad Hilton Humanitarian Award seminar, the Synergos Institute’s University for a Night at the United Nations, the International AIDS Conference and the European Foundation Centre’s general assembly. He has also been an invited participant at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria. Since 2009 he has been President and Senior Advisor of Philanthropy Directions International, a philanthropic consulting firm in Northern Virginia. His fluid yet precise style has caught the eye of other writers, including Pat Conroy, who offered a jacket quote for Arc of the Comet shortly before his passing in March 2016, and Fergal Keane, award-winning journalist for the BBC.
