Poet Profile

Meredith Ackroyd

Meredith Ackroyd is a poet, artist, and mother. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Children’s Literature from Hollins University, where she studied the writing of poetry for children, and she has a BA in English from the College of William and Mary. She has worked as a copy editor in academic publishing and has formally studied studio art, with an emphasis on functional ceramics. Her poetry has been published in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, tinywords, and The Heron's Nest, among other publications for both adults and children. She lives in a hollow of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia with her husband and two daughters, in a house where the phoebes nest each spring.

Awards and Other Honors:

Touchstone Award for Individual Poems (2021).

strawberry moon
listening to the soft ping
of jam jars cooling

his joke
breaks the silence
mayapples

subtexts
we cross the invisible
flight lines of bees

the tendril's reach
I teach my daughters to find
seeds inside peas

sounding the depth
of this darkness
spring peepers

before
they were my daughters. . .
wildflowers

Credits:

“strawberry moon” - Modern Haiku, Vol. 47.1, Winter–Spring 2016; “his joke” - Modern Haiku Vol. 47.3, Autumn 2016; “subtexts” - tinywords Issue 19.2, September 2019; “the tendril's reach” - The Helping Hand Haiku Anthology, ed. by Robert Epstein, October 2020; “sounding the depth” - The Heron's Nest Vol. XXIII, Number 3, September 2021; “before” - Frogpond Vol. 44:3, Autumn 2021.