Poet Erika Meitner to Give Reading at UT Nov. 7

Poet Erika Meitner, author of Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, Ideal Cities, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls and Copia, will give a reading at The University of Tampa on Tuesday, Nov. 7. The event begins at 7 p.m. in the Scarfone/Hartley Gallery and is free and open to the public.

During the event, Meitner will read from her latest book, Copia, which confronts the widespread implications of commercialism and overconsumption, particularly in exurban America. In addition, she will read snippets of her new work for an upcoming book scheduled for release in the fall of 2018.

Meitner’s first book of poetry, Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, won the 2002 Anhinga Prize for Poetry and was published a year later by Anhinga Press. Ideal Cities, her second collection, was selected by Paul Guest as the winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series Competition and was published a year later by HarperCollins. Her next two works of poetry, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls and Copia, were published in 2011 and 2014, respectively.

In 2015, Meitner was the U.S.-U.K. Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Currently, she is an associate professor of English, as well as the director of the MFA program in creative writing and the undergraduate creative writing program at Virginia Tech.

For more information, contact Donald Morrill, associate dean of graduate and continuing studies and Dana professor of English, at dmorrill@ut.edu, or Shane Hinton, associate professor of English and writing, at shinton@ut.edu.