MEG DAY is a 2013 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, three-time Pushcart-nominated poet, nationally awarded spoken word artist, & veteran arts educator who is currently a PhD fellow in Poetry & Disability Poetics at the University of Utah. Meg hails from San Diego by way of Oakland, where she taught young poets to hold their own at the mic with Youth Speaks, & as a Teaching Artist with WritersCorps in San Francisco.
A 2010 Lambda Fellow, 2011 Hedgebrook Fellow, & 2012 Squaw Valley Fellow, Meg has received numerous grants & awards including the 2012 AWP Intro Journals Award, the 2011 Shirley Award for Emerging Poets, the Mary Merritt Prize, & two Creating Queer Community grants from the International Queer Arts Festival. Meg’s manuscript, When All You Have Is A Hammer, recently won Gertrude Press’ 2012 Chapbook Contest & will be published in 2013. Her manuscript, WE CAN’T READ THIS, was a finalist for the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Prize, the Gatewood First Book Prize, & twice for the Omnidawn First Book Award.
In 2006 Meg became San Diego’s first queer Spoken Word Grand Champion, a title she held for three years running. Since then, Meg has been featured at The San Diego Hip Hop Festival, Fists Up: International Deaf Day Celebration, Life is Living Festival, The San Francisco Queer Arts Festival, The San Diego AIDS Walk, KPFA Radio with Beyond the Odds, and a variety of venues throughout the west & east coasts. Meg’s poetry has been published most recently in The Bakery, la fovea, Generations, WITH+STAND, ZYZZYVA, sPARKLE&bLINk and Drunken Boat. Her work is forthcoming from Fugue, The Atlas Review, Women Write Resistance: An Anthology, Artful Dodge, This Assignment is So Gay: Poems from LGBTQ Teachers, & Troubling the Line: An Anthology of Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics.
In 2010, Meg returned from a Pacific Northwest tour with The Poetic Liberation Collective of Oakland, CA to complete her MFA in Poetry at Mills College; that summer was named by OUT-ART Magazine as one of the nation’s “Top 30 Under 30″ up-and-coming artists. Meg currently lives & writes in Salt Lake City where she publishes the femme ally zine, ON OUR KNEES.