Christopher Merrill : part one

Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.

Photo credit: Ram Devineni

What are you working on?

I have just sent off the galleys for a new book of prose poems, Flares, which White Pine Press will publish in May, not long after the University of Iowa Press issues “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up”: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings, A Selection with Commentary, which my colleague, Ed Folsom, and I wrote. Meantime I am writing The Trials of Roger Williams, a biography of my first relative in the New World, while remaining alert for something that might become a poem.