Christopher Merrill

Biography

Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, including Brilliant Water and Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and four books of nonfiction, including Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages, and he is the book critic for the daily radio news program, The World. He directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

http://www.christophermerrillbooks.com/

See Work

PROFILES

Joshua Casteel (1979-2012)

By Christopher Merrill
REPORTING

Passover in the West Bank

By Christopher Merrill

[caption id=”attachment_938” align=”alignnone” width=”500” caption=”Samaritans perform their traditional slaughter of the Passover sacrifice ceremony at Mount Gerizim, north of the West Bank town of Nablus.”] [/caption]

Photographs by Ammar...

Summer 2009

Relative Calm

By Christopher Merrill
ESSAYS / Fall 2004

A Kind of Solution

By Christopher Merrill


The writer was drinking himself to death. In his first flush of freedom—he had come to Iowa from a land ruled by a military dictatorship—he drowned himself in vodka, and when for the third day running he was rushed to the emergency room...