Erika Meitner, one of this year’s Creative Arts Award recipients, talks about going analog, changing minds by breaking hearts, and the power of telling our own stories.
When Professor Erika Meitner first stepped onto campus more than two decades ago as the 2001-02 Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, it immediately felt different. Special. There seemed something unusual in the water here, this unlikely isthmus town responsible for more than its fair share of writers. Remarkably, many of the undergraduate students she taught in that single fellowship year went on to flourish in publishing careers. It was only a snapshot in time, but Wisconsin quietly became a part of her — she, a poet who would spend the next 20 years making a name for herself by writing deftly about “place” before coming back to this one in 2022 as a tenure-track professor in the UW Creative Writing program.
“I knew how great the University was, and so it felt more like a homecoming than a deep shift or strange dislocation or anything,” says Meitner, who today directs two programs on campus: the lauded, highly competitive MFA Program in Creative Writing, and the Conney Project on Jewish Arts, an initiative of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies.
“I think the biggest shift has been moving to the Midwest because I was an Appalachian regional poet for a while, even though I’m Jewish and from New York,” says Meitner. “I think that piece is something I’m still figuring out here. What does it mean to change geographies when you’re a poet of place?”
Meitner’s bio — not the bulleted list of impressive degrees, publications and awards you can read on her CV, but the truer story of who she is and how she got here — depends on where you start the story. She has published six poetry collections, with a seventh, “Assembled Audience,” coming out from Milkweed Editions next year. That collection is about climate change and earned her the 2025 Emily Mead Baldwin Award in the Creative Arts to help her see it to fruition. Meitner has created numerous documentary poetry projects, snagged competitive residencies, and published widely in prestigious literary journals and anthologies including Ada Limón’s 2024 U.S. Poet Laureate project “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World” — in other words, she’s been around. But of all the embedded places and embodied identities, there is one constant: through writing, she can always find her way home.
Writing the Trauma, Owning the History
Raised in Queens and Long Island, Meitner went back to school in 1999 to pursue her MFA at the University of Virginia. After that came the formative fellowship year at UW–Madison, then she sold her first book — “Inventory at the All-night Drugstore,” which won the 2002 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. She was pursuing her Ph.D. in religious studies at UVA when she got a dream offer: a tenure track poetry position at Virginia Tech.
It was April 2007. She negotiated the job offer while in labor with her first child, and signed her contract on Friday the 13th. On Monday, April 16, the Virginia Tech shooting devastated her new campus.
At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Thirty-two people were killed, another 17 were injured. The shooter, who died by suicide, had been an English student. Media trucks posted up in what seemed to be permanent positions, hungrily publishing stories of trauma that weren’t always told by the people who lived them.
“My first tenure-track job teaching creative writing was to highly traumatized people who were trying to narrate one of the most heavily mediated events in U.S. history,” says Meitner, who arrived that fall with a six-month-old baby and a keen awareness of how to navigate trauma through writing because of her own family’s history. Her grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Her mother was born in 1947 in the refugee camp where they were living after they were liberated from Auschwitz. But throughout Meitner’s life, none of them would talk about it.
“Part of the reason I’m a writer is because I learned about what they had been through not from them, but from literature, and the stories other people told about their experiences,” she says. “It made me sort of weirdly equipped to show up at Virginia Tech in the moment I did, because I’d been used to operating in a context where my entire family, my whole life, had been deeply traumatized in this very particular way. And I knew that literature was a way through that kind of trauma.”
Virginia Tech is located in Blacksburg, a rural pocket of southwest Virginia. Meitner taught there for 15 years, which means she lived and raised a family in a deeply Christian, gun-toting, Bible Belt area. She led her students through understanding their historic trauma while continuing to interrogate her own. “Ideal Cities,” Meitner’s second collection, was published by HarperCollins and was a 2009 National Poetry series winner. She published five books during her tenure at Virginia Tech, including “Holy Moly Carry Me,” winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. In that collection, Meitner explored gun culture and what it was like to be raising one white son and one Black son as one of only a few Jewish families in town. But she was already expanding her lens to the field of documentary poetry, and to other communities navigating other traumas — Detroit before and after bankruptcy. Cleveland during the Republican National Convention. Miami, post Hurricane Irma. “Cities in moments of social change or crisis,” Meitner says.
The publishing expectations at Virginia Tech were intense, but that didn’t mean the creative writing programs she helped run were seen as a priority. When she was offered the tenured professor position at UW–Madison, she knew it would be different here. She remembered. In 2022, she and her family packed up and moved to Wisconsin.
Next-Gen Heart-Breakers and Game-Changers
Meitner is now a member of the English Department in a Creative Writing program that boasts numerous prizewinning writers and prolific publishers. Undergraduates get the rare experience of a thesis workshop, in which they work one-on-one with a professor — this fall it will be Meitner — to create a manuscript. UW–Madison’s fully funded MFA program admits just six students each year, alternating between poetry and fiction, and those graduate students also teach. Post-graduate Institute for Creative Writing fellows teach undergraduates, and the full department’s faculty, fellows, students and alumni have won or been finalists for Whiting Awards — most recently Claire Luchette, just last month — National Book Awards, National Book Critics Circle Awards, even the Pulitzer Prize. Dorothy Draheim Professor of English Beth Nguyen just received a 2024-25 Guggenheim Fellowship. UW English and First Wave alum poet Danez Smith, already a National Book Award finalist, was named a 2025 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
“We get students who come to UW–Madison because of the creative writing program — that’s not the case at a lot of large state universities,” Meitner says. “The quality of our students is extraordinary. And they’re now scattered all over the country as faculty, too, so they’re influencing a whole new generation of writers.”
That new generation is facing unprecedented challenges. In order to combat just one of them — the effects of AI in the classroom — Meitner went fully analog this year. She purchased a stack of notebooks in a rainbow of colors and her students have done all their writing by hand. “So much of poetry is about surprise in language, and breaking out of predictive patterns,” Meitner says. Then there are the challenges to their identities. Whether they are international students, or they embody a spectrum of gender and sexual identities, one thing Meitner doesn’t have to teach is what’s at stake, or why it matters. “They get it,” she says. “Dorothy Allison said that if you want to change people’s minds, you have to break their heart. What we’re teaching students to do is tell their own stories, make their own art, that speaks for them and their situations and their histories and their identities. And that cultural change is a really big way that we get to political change.”
On Wisconsin
Moving forward, Meitner will be using the Creative Arts Award to finish and edit “Assembled Audience,” which she’ll work on at an upcoming residency this summer. “My kids play seven instruments between them, including the tuba, so I tend to get more of my work done over the summers if I leave my house,” she says, laughing.
She’ll also continue to bring visiting poets from the larger Madison community into her classrooms. Like Sarah Matthes, who came to town as part of the Monsters of Poetry series started by one of Meitner’s 2001 undergraduates, Adam Fell. Or UW MFA alum Alison Thumel, author of “Architect,” an elegy for her brother who died in a car accident. “She started that book in Lynda Barry’s class, and so she came in to talk to my Advanced 509 poetry workshop,” Meitner says. “The students really enjoy those interactions with living, breathing poets.”
Getting tapped to be the new director of the Conney Project for Jewish Arts in April 2024 has brought her personal and academic histories full circle, and she’s got a number of related projects in the works. In Spring 2025, she partnered with the Wisconsin Book Festival to bring in Solomon Brager, a graphic memoirist who is the great-grandchild of Holocaust survivors and also happens to be trans, both of which are explored in their memoir. Next year she’s hoping to bring a feminist singer of Judeo-Arab music to campus, and is also working on bringing an exhibit of some of Meryl Meisler’s never-before-seen photographs from the 1970s to Madison. What’s more, she is part of the inaugural cohort for the Mandel Cultural Leadership Fellowship (2023-2025), a Jewish fellowship she says has helped both with planning the Conney Project and her own work.
All of this is, admittedly, a lot. Meitner recharges her creative energy by going for long walks along glacial kettle ponds rife with birds. “I’ve become a bird person, which I never thought would happen,” she says, adding that she’s even adapting to the frigid weather. Yes, she bought a second electric blanket, but she also took up cross-country skiing this year. “I’m trying to learn to winter,” she says.
That’s what we must do, to really know a place. Live within it as it exists today. Observe it, interrogate it, and imagine what it could be. Then help the next generation do the same.
Maggie Ginsberg is the writer for the Division of the Arts at UW–Madison.