Meg Day
Award-winning Poet
Poetry Editor for Quarterly West
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- An Evening with Meg Day
Biography
“In this writing, the poetic is political; through this investigation the body of the person and the body of the poem both move in new ways. ‘I am not praying./ I’m longing,’ Meg Day writes in an early poem, and that longing sounds a certain thrum under all the noise of the world: ‘Come home. Come home.’” —Kazim Ali
“Meg Day grapples with serious themes – illness, violence, suicide, grief – with admirable skill and approaches issues of sexual orientation, identity, and gender with a true poet’s passion. This is muscular language, worthy of its inspiration.” —Ellen Bass
Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and The Publishing Triangle’s 2015 Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Of Day’s full length collection, D.A. Powell observed: “The vivid impermanence of the body is like kindling catching, a source of fire for Meg Day, a poet whose fearless heart is tethered to the world. This is a commanding book and a portent for the vitality of poetry.”
Day is also the author of two chapbooks: When All You Have Is a Hammer, winner of the 2012 Gertrude Press Chapbook Contest, and We Can’t Read This, which won the 2013 Gazing Grain Chapbook Contest. Gazing Grain Judge Cathy Park Hong said We Can’t Read This is “a how-to on re-imagining the body and language… Through diagrams of sign language and spare fragmented lyrics, the series dramatizes the physical struggle of speech and movingly charts alternate modes of cognition. These poems are a personal and political rumination on disability as well as a beautiful and transformative exegesis on empathy.” In 2019, Day published an Unsung Masters volume, Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2019), with co-editor Niki Herd.
Day’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2020, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, and Vinyl, among other journals, and in recent anthologies, including Best New Poets, Wingbeats II: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival edited by Andrea Gibson, and Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics.
The 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Day has also received awards and fellowships from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Amy Clampitt Fund, Lambda Literary Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Community of Writers, the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities, the International Queer Arts Festival, an Andy Warhol Foundation Creative Research Grant for ASL Poetry via VisArts Raleigh, and a North Carolina Humanities Grant.
Day holds an M.F.A. from Mills College, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing with an emphasis on Disability Poetics from the University of Utah where Day was a Steffensen-Cannon Fellow, a United States Point Foundation Scholar, and Poetry Editor for Quarterly West. The Guggenheim Museum named Day as its 2024 Poet-in-Residence; Day’s residency, All Ears, aims to highlight deaf poets, encourage engagement with American Sign Language, and reorient understandings of language.
Day is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University.
Visit Author WebsiteVideos
Publications
Last Psalm at Sea Level
Poetry, 2014
Poetry. LGBT Studies. Deaf Poetics. “Lovely does not suffice, nor does lyric. Eloquence is only a grasping in the space of ineffable air. There are few words or phrases that do justice to the soul singing its own revelations. That place is where Last Psalm at Sea Level lives, where it is as solid as gold burning itself into light.” –Afaa Michael Weaver
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• Review of Last Psalm at Sea Level by Meg Day – Lambda Literary
• Interview with Meg Day – Devil’s Lake
Listen to Audio
• You Get Proud by Practicing – Poetry Off the Shelf
• 382: “Another Night at Sea Level” by Meg Day – The Slow Down Show
Selected Writings
• Read “Vespers” by Meg Day – poets.org
Portrait of My Gender as [Inaudible]
I knew I was a god
when you could not
agree on my name
& still, none you spoke
could force me to listen
closer. Is this the nothing
the antelope felt when
Adam, lit on his own
entitling, dubbed family,
genus, species? So many
descendants became
doctors, delivered
babies, bestowed bodies
names as if to say it is to make it
so. Can it be a comfort between
us, the fact of my creation?
I was made in the image
of a thing without
an image & silence, too,
is your invention. Who prays
for a god except to appear
with answers, but never
a body? A voice? If I told you
you wouldn’t believe me
because I was the one
to say it. On the first day
there was no sound
worth mentioning. If I, too,
am a conductor of air, the only
praise I know is in stereo
(one pair—an open hand & closed
fist—will have to do). I made
a photograph of my name:
there was a shadow in a field
& I put my shadow in it. You
can’t hear me, but I’m there.
