Last Psalm at Sea Level

"Lovely does not suffice, nor does lyric. Eloquence is only a grasping in the space of ineffable air. There are few words or phrases that do justice to the soul singing its own revelations. That place is where Last Psalm at Sea Level lives, where it is as solid as gold burning itself into light." — Afaa Michael Weaver

"The vivid impermanence of the body is like kindling catching, a source of fire for Meg Day, a poet whose fearless heart is tethered to the world. This is a commanding book and a portent for the vitality of poetry." — D.A. Powell

Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and The Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Day is the author of two chapbooks: When All You Have Is a Hammer (winner of the 2012 Gertrude Press Chapbook Contest), and We Can't Read This (winner of the 2013 Gazing Grain Chapbook Contest). In 2019, Day published an Unsung Masters volume, Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2019), with co-editor Niki Herd. Day's poems appear or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, POETRY Magazine, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, and Vinyl, among other journals, and in recent anthologies, including Best New Poets, Wingbeats II: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival edited by Andrea Gibson, and Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics.

Day was raised in northern California's Bay Area. Day holds a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego, an M.F.A. from Mills College, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing with an emphasis on Disability Poetics from the University of Utah where Day was a Steffensen-Cannon Fellow, a United States Point Foundation Scholar, and Poetry Editor for Quarterly West. The 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Day has also received awards and fellowships from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, The Amy Clampitt Fund, Lambda Literary Foundation, Hedgebrook, Squaw Valley Writers, the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities, and the International Queer Arts Festival. A recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Creative Research Grant and a North Carolina Humanities Grant, Day was most recently named the Guggenheim Museum's Poet-in-Residence and SouthArts North Carolina State Fellow in Literary Arts. Day is Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program at North Carolina State University.