Erika Meitner was born and raised in Queens and Long Island, New York.  She attended Dartmouth College (for an A.B. in Creative Writing in 1996), Hebrew University on a Reynolds Scholarship, and the University of Virginia, where she received her M.F.A. in 2001 as a Henry Hoyns Fellow.

In 2001-2 she was the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and has received additional fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (2002, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009), the Blue Mountain Center (2006), and the Sewanee Writers' Conference (John N. Wall Fellowship, 2003).  Her poems have appeared in publications including The Southern Review, Slate, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, and APR.

© Photo by Steve Trost, 2009

© Photos by Rachel Florman, 2003

Her first book, Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, won the 2002 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and was published in 2003 by Anhinga Press.  It was also a finalist for the 2004 Paterson Poetry Prize.  Her second book, Ideal Cities, was selected by Paul Guest as a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series competition, and will be out in 2010 from HarperCollins.  Her third collection, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, will be published by Anhinga Press in 2011.  Read a brief interview with Erika about her poetry here, a slightly longer one here, and a short essay about her poetics here.

Meitner is a first-generation American:  her father is from Haifa, Israel; her mother was born in Stuttgart, Germany, which is where her maternal grandparents settled after surviving Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Mauthausen concentration camps.  

In addition to teaching creative writing at UVA, UW-Madison, and the University of California-Santa Cruz, she has worked as a dating columnist, an office temp, a Hebrew school instructor, a computer programmer, a lifeguard, a documentary film production assistant, and a middle school teacher in the New York City public school system. 

She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program, and is also simultaneously completing her doctorate in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where she was the Morgenstern Fellow in Jewish Studies, and also served as a member of the Virginia Quarterly Review's Poetry Board.