Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1966, and educated at the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock, Constance Merritt is the author of three collections of poems: A Protocol for Touch (University of North Texas Press, 2000), winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Book Award, Blessings and Inclemencies (Louisiana State University Press, 2007), and Two Rooms (forthcoming from the Louisiana State University Press in 2009). In 2001 Merritt received a grant from the Rona Jaffe Writers' Foundation and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Merritt was also a 2002 Cave Canem fellow. From 2003 to 2005 she served as the Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College. Currently, she lives and gardens in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Two Rooms, poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2009), Blessings and Inclemencies (Louisiana State University Press, 2007), A Protocol for Touch (University of North Texas Press, 2000)

American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000)

Callaloo, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, The New Yorker, Women's Review of Books