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 and city squares – and taught for the Arvon Foundation, Morley College and the Poetry School, too.

At present, I teach creative writing and literature at the University of East Anglia.

I’m interested in place, environment and interiority’s encounters with the same – and I’m currently working on

• a whole bunch of new poems for a new collection provisionally called Menstruant
• a creative non-fiction book 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, was published by Verve Poetry Press in 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.