Meg Day

Deaf, genderqueer poet Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the co-editor of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2019). The 2024 Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence and recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, Day’s work can be found in, or forthcoming from, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, & elsewhere. Day is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing in the MFA Program at NC State.

Artist Statement

I am committed to poetics as a liberatory practice. As a Deaf trans poet living in the South, my approach to craft continues to evolve the more I make, learn, read, & teach from within a nation in constant pursuit of legislating my public & private life. This downward pressure has shaped much of my poetics: political efforts to prevent body sovereignty is its own inherited form. As such, my work in invested in occupying, ghosting, & queering received forms as a way of discovering what else they might offer or accomplish when bent or broken. For many years, I employed poetic tactics I had honed in graduate school: vowels in English are not audible to me—nor are they easily lip-read—& I have long used memorized English rhymes or matched eye-rhymes to create patterns & approximated meters that appeal to the hearing ear. For too long I prioritized a relationship with sound that wasn’t all that intrinsic to my experience as a person, or relevant to my personal politics & my practice as a poet. My new poems are in search of a new sound, a Deaf sonics. As an artist, I aim to confront directly the complexity & depth of American Sign Language & English mingling on the page as fully embodied & unapologetic—in both content & in form.