Karla Linn Merrifield

About Me

A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and 2009 Everglades National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had poetry appear in dozens of publications as well as in many anthologies. She has five books to her credit, including Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing), which received the 2009 Andrew Eiseman Writers Award for Poetry. Forthcoming from Salmon Poetry is her full-length collection, Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North. She was founding poetry editor of Sea Stories (www.seastories.org), and is now book reviewer and assistant editor for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com) and moderator of the poetry blog, Smothered Air (http://smotheredair.yuku.com/). She is currently at work on a project with poet William Heyen, photo-illustrating his essay, “The Green Bookcase,” soon to be published by Janus Head. She also teaches at Writers & Books, Rochester, NY. You can read more about her and sample her poems and photographs at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com. She resides in Kent, NY and North Fort Myers Beach, FL>

Why do you write?

Nature. Nature. Nature. Nature. And my husband.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Poets: William Heyen, Lorna Crozier, Fred Skloot

Nonfiction: E.O. Wilson, Craig Childs, Michael Englehard, John Muir, William Bartram