Erika Meitner

Erika Meitner is a contemporary American poet whose work maps the intersections of American landscape, consumer culture, faith, and grief with a documentary energy and lyric intensity that have earned her wide recognition. Born and raised in New York, Meitner has spent much of her adult life in the American South and Mid-Atlantic region, and the landscapes she inhabits — suburban strip malls, evangelical megachurches, dying post-industrial towns, big-box stores — are central presences in her poetry. She earned her MFA from the University of Virginia and is a professor in the MFA program at Virginia Tech.

Her debut collection, Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (2003), was selected by Eleanor Wilner for the Anhinga Poetry Prize. Subsequent collections have deepened and expanded her distinctive vision: Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (2011) and Copia (2014) — winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry — established her as a poet of unusual thematic range and formal versatility. Holy Moly Carry Me (2018) brought her characteristic engagement with American landscapes and Jewish identity into dialogue with questions of motherhood, vulnerability, and divine presence in an age of violence. Her most recent collection, Useful Junk (2022), turns its attention to the detritus of American consumer culture, finding in discarded objects and overlooked spaces both elegy and unexpected grace.

Meitner’s poetry is informed by her engagement with Jewish textual traditions, Appalachian culture, and American vernacular speech, and she has been praised for her ability to hold together the sacred and the commercial, the intimate and the documentary. Her work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and other organizations.

Meitner is a significant figure in contemporary poetry’s engagement with American place — a poet who takes seriously the spiritual and ethical dimensions of the landscapes most Americans actually inhabit, rather than idealized natural or urban settings. Her work is accessible without being simple, politically engaged without being didactic, and grounded in a love of the world that encompasses its ugliness alongside its beauty.