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), a Library of Virginia Book Award finalist, and Two Rooms (Louisiana State University Press, 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.  From 2003 to 2005 Merritt served as the Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College. Currently, she lives in Louisville, Kentucky.