Former SBC Banister Writer Publishes Poetry Collection

From staff reports

Constance Merritt, former SBC Banister Writer-in-Residence, has published her second collection of poems, “ Blessings and Inclemencies.”

According to a press release from the publisher, Louisiana State University Press, “ … ‘Blessings and Inclemencies’ is conventional in its forms and radical in its reaching back to the ground of being and to the originality and immediacy of our first encounters with language.”

Merritt’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, the New Yorker and other publications. Her first poetry collection, “A Protocol for Touch,” was the 1999 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry selection and a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Book Award.

Merritt lives in Lynchburg.