Joanne Greenberg is an American author born September 24, 1932, in Brooklyn, New York. She was an adjunct instructor of anthropology at the Colorado School of Mines, an elementary school teacher, and a volunteer with the Lookout Mountain Fire Department and the Highland Rescue Team.
Ms. Greenberg is best known for the classic novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden in 1964. The book became a movie in 1977 and a play in 2004. Penguin Books recently re-released it in their Classics Collection.
Her first book, released in 1963, The King’s Persons, received the Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Fiction Award and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. She appears in the 2004 Daniel Mackler documentary Take These Broken Wings, about recovering from schizophrenia without the use of psychiatric medication.
She is also known for In This Sign, written in 1970 and recognized as a definitive novel about the Deaf in America. Hallmark Hall of Fame made that book into a made-for-TV movie, Love Is Never Silent, in 1985.