Rob Merritt

Master of Fine Arts Visiting Writer and Lecturer

Rob Merritt

Rob Merritt

Rob Merritt is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Bluefield College in Virginia. He as born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and received a B.A. and M.A. at UNC-Chapel Hill and a PhD in English at the University of Kentucky.

Merritt has published articles on Pound, Joyce, and Yeats and the critical book Early Music and the Aesthetics of Ezra Pound.  He attended NEH seminar on Yeats in Ireland in 2019. He is the author of the poetry collections View from Blue-Jade Mountain (2019), The Language of Longing, and Landscape ArchitectsHis poetry and essays have appeared in KestrelPine Mountain Sand and Gravel, The Pikeville Review, and The Asheville Poetry Review, among other journals, and the collections The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VII: North Carolina; Wild Sweet Notes II: Contemporary West Virginia Writers; and Coal: An Anthology. 

Merritt has taught American poetry and poetry writing at the Jiangsu Second Normal University in Nanjing, China. He has tried to bring to his writing about the Appalachian Mountains the sense of geographical context demonstrated in the work of the Chinese “Rivers and Mountains” poets.

A member of the National Association for Poetry Therapy, he has worked to share the healing power of expressive writing.

Since 2012, he has been one of the fiction judges for the annual Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition.

For information about program specifics, please contact:

William Walsh
Program Director
BJW@reinhardt.edu

For admissions information, please contact:

Office of Professional Studies and Graduate Admissions
770-720-9191
gradadmissions@reinhardt.edu