Bio

Megan Levad Beisner is the author of Why We Live in the Dark Ages, the first selection in Tavern Books' Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series, and What Have I to Say to You, published by Tavern in 2018. Her writing has been praised as “surprising,” “vivid, imposing,” (San Francisco Chronicle), “exquisite” (Bombay Gin), and “odd, darkly funny, very smart” (Portland Mercury). The Paris Review wrote that What Have I to Say to You is not only full of “memorable lines and bold vision,” but is “one of the best poetry books of the last fifteen years.” 

A MacDowell, Surel’s Place, and Vermont Studio Center Fellow, Meg’s poems have appeared in Tin House, Poem-a-Day, Granta, Fence, and London art and fashion magazine AnOther, among other publications. She also writes for music. Her first collaboration was Murder, a song cycle with Tucker Fuller; one of the songs, “American Murderer,” was published in the Everyman's Library anthology Killer Verse. Meg has since written lyrics for several pieces, including “Let Us Plant Our Gardens Now,” with Dominick DiOrio, who also set “Broken” with text from What Have I to Say to You, the first section of Cantata for a More Hopeful Tomorrow with Damien Geter, and “Volta” and Given a Body with Kristin Kuster. Kristin and Meg presented their first opera, Kept, an ecofeminist Gothic Romance, in May 2017 at the Virginia Arts Festival, with support from the John Duffy Institute for New Opera. When There Are Nine, their song cycle about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was premiered at the 2019 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music by mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton. Meg and Tucker continue to collaborate, and an opera about a rural community threatened by a wildfire is currently in progress with Andrea Reinkemeyer.

Born and raised in rural Iowa, Meg earned her BA in English from The University of Iowa and her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. She is a founding editor of Public School Poetry  who has lived and taught at the public universities in Ann Arbor, San Francisco, and Los Alamos, and is now based in rural California. There, Meg creates literary programming for the public library, hosts readings for the county arts council, and teaches ethics and justice for Boise State University from her home with her husband and son near Yosemite National Park.