Furtive11

Hello, I’m Meryl.  I write poems and prose and make occasional sound pieces for fun.

The other thing I do with my life is teach!  I love it.  I taught secondary school English and Drama in my twenties and thirties, and then spent some time as a freelance educator in museums, before teaching creative writing and poetry for a range of educational institutions. I’ve given creative writing workshops in schools, prisons, museums, city squares, the Arvon Foundation’s Under 18s week at Lumb Bank and taught undergraduate creative writing and poetry modules too. 

At present, I teach First Encounters for Poetry School, and on the MA Creative Writing (Poetry) – at University of East Anglia.

My PhD considered interiority’s intersection with environment and contemporary poetics and I’m still interested in those areas.  I’m currently working on

• a whole bunch of new poems for a new collection provisionally called Menstruant
• a creative non-fiction book, Feral City, which thinks about place, personhood, poetry and the Anthropocene urban pastoral – and is due out from Penned-in-the-Margins in 2022.

Publications:

My third poetry pamphlet, Wife of Osiris, is out now with Verve Poetry Press (May 2021)!

Natural Phenomena, (2018, Penned-in-the-Margins) was the Poetry Book Society’s Spring Guest Selection for that year, Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes, a Poetry School Book of the Year and long-listed in the 2020 Laurel Prize.

Wife of Osiris (pamphlet), 2021, Verve Poetry Press.

Natural Phenomena, 2018, Penned-in-the-Margins.

The Bridle (pamphlet), 2011, Salt.

Relinquish (pamphlet), 2007, Arrowhead Press.