Constance Merritt is an American poet. [1] [2] [3] Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1966, and educated at the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock. She is also the winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Book Award. [4] In 2001, Merritt received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. From 2003 to 2005, Merritt served as the Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College. In 2005 she received Arkansas's Porter Prize. Merritt lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
Besides attending the School for the Blind, Constance Merritt attended the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where she received her B.A and M.A. She then attended the University of Nebraska, in Lincoln, where she received her PhD in creative writing. Also at the University of Louisville, Kentucky; Merritt attended and received her M.S. in social work.
Constance Merritt and partner Maria Accardi, decided to help start a non-profit for low-income people who cannot leave their home, Bringing Justice Home founded in 2020, helps bring food and household supplies to individuals who are homebound during the pandemic. She currently plays the role of treasurer in this organization, which serves to provide food that people actually want and not just need “rejecting the idea that beggars can’t be choosers” (Maria Accardi from WDRB interview). Their goals include creating just relationships, fighting food insecurity, and providing resources to those in need of them.
Merritt is the author of four collections of poems: Blind Girl Grunt: The Selected Blues Lyrics and Other Poems (Sequim, WA, Headmistress Press, 2017),Two Rooms (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2009), Blessings and Inclemencies (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2007) and A Protocol for Touch (Denton: UNT Press, 2000).
Louisiana State University is a public land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The university was founded in 1860 near Pineville, Louisiana, under the name Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy. The current LSU main campus was dedicated in 1926, consists of more than 250 buildings constructed in the style of Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, and the main campus historic district occupies a 650-acre (260 ha) plateau on the banks of the Mississippi River.
Julia Randall was an American poet, professor, and environmental activist; recipient of many honors for her poetry, she published seven books of poetry culminating in The Path to Fairview: New and Selected Poems . Described as “one of America's purest and most original lyric poets”, her honors include the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (1980), the Poets’ Prize (1988) for her book Moving in Memory, as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Institute of Arts & Letters (1968), and a Sewanee Review Fellowship (1957).
Claudia Emerson was an American poet. She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Late Wife, and was named the Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Tim Kaine in 2008.
Dara Barrois/Dixon is an American poet and the author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina. Other titles include In the Still of the Night, You Good Thing, Reverse Rapture, Hat on a Pond and Voyages in English . She has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Center Book Award, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Cultural Council have generously supported her work. Limited editions include (X in Fix)(2003) from Rain Taxi’s brainstorm series), Thru (2019) and Two Poems (2021) from Scram, and forthcoming in 2022, Nine Poems from Incessant Pipe. With James Tate, she rescued The Lost Epic of Arthur Davidson Ficke, published by Waiting for Godot Books. Poems can be found in Granta, Volt, Conduit,, Incessant Pipe, Biscuit Hill, blush, can we have our ball back, Itinerant, American Poetry Review, Octopus, Gulf Coast, and The Nation. She’s been poet-in-residence at the University of Montana, University of Texas Austin, Emory University, and the University of Utah; she was the 2005 Louis Rubin chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She lives and works in factory hollow in Western Massachusetts.
David Kirby is an American poet and the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University (FSU).
Gibbons Ruark is a contemporary American poet. Known for his deeply personal often elegiac lyrics about his native North Carolina and beloved Ireland, Ruark has had poetry in such publications as The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Poetry. His collections include Rescue the Perishing, Small Rain, Keeping Company, Reeds, A Program for Survival, Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems, Staying Blue, and, most recently, The Road to Ballyvaughan. He has won numerous awards including three Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland and a Pushcart Prize.
David Madden is an American writer of many novels, short stories, poems, plays, and works of nonfiction and literary criticism.
Enid Shomer is an American poet and fiction writer. She is the author of five poetry collections, two short story collections and a novel. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Paris Review, The New Criterion, Parnassus, Kenyon Review, Tikkun, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, New Stories from the South, the Year's Best, Modern Maturity, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her stories, poems, and essays have been included in more than fifty anthologies and textbooks, including Poetry: A HarperCollins Pocket Anthology. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in The New Times Book Review, The Women's Review of Books, and elsewhere. Two of her books, Stars at Noon and Imaginary Men, were the subjects of feature interviews on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Her writing is often set in or influenced by life in the State of Florida. Shomer was Poetry Series Editor for the University of Arkansas Press from 2002 to 2015, and has taught at many universities, including the University of Arkansas, Florida State University, and the Ohio State University, where she was the Thurber House Writer-in-Residence.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is an American poet, essayist and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and currently Regents Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Robert Morgan is an American poet, short story writer, and novelist.
Terry Randolph Hummer is an American poet, critic, essayist, editor, and professor. His most recent books of poetry are After the Afterlife and the three linked volumes Ephemeron, Skandalon, and Eon. He has published poems in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, The Literati Quarterly, Paris Review, and Georgia Review. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship inclusion in the 1995 edition of Best American Poetry, the Hanes Prize for Poetry, the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence, and three Pushcart Prizes.
Maxine Cassin (1927–2010) was a poet, editor, and publisher who influenced and published many New Orleans poets, most notably Everette Maddox, founder of the Maple Leaf Bar poetry reading series.
Kelly Cherry was a novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.
Jacqueline Osherow is an American poet, and Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah.
Jen McClanaghan is an American poet. She won the 2009 Georgetown Review Prize.
Catharine Savage Brosman is an American poet, essayist, and scholar of French literature and a former professor at Tulane University, where she held the Gore Chair of French Studies.
Ava Leavell Haymon was the 2013–2015 Poet Laureate of Louisiana.
Sue Owen is a dark humor poet influenced by the work of W. S. Merwin, Charles Simic, and Mark Strand. As the Poet-in-Residence, she taught poetry writing until 2005 at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Mary Eliza Merritt was an American nurse who was the first African American to be licensed as nurse in Kentucky. Merritt was awarded the Mary Mahoney Medal for distinguished service in nursing from the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1949.
Katie George is an American sportscaster who currently works with the ACC Network and ESPN. Before starting her broadcasting career, she had been a three-time all-conference selection in volleyball at the University of Louisville and Miss Kentucky USA in 2015.