Dr. Jeredith Merrin is a Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University, where she has taught since 1987.  She is the author of two widely acclaimed books of poetry, Shift (1996) and Bat Ode (2001).  Poet Mark Doty praises the "finely made poems" in Bat Ode as occasions for "the deep fissures and stresses beneath the surface to emerge, to be examined, considered, to become the occasions for a humane, sobering and fierce sort of song."  Dr. Merrin is also the author of An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition (1990), an exploration of these 20th-century poets' responses to Renaissance and Romantic traditions, in addition to numerous articles on 20th-Century poetry.  Currently Dr. Merrin is at work on a new collection of poems and a new book of essays on poets and poetry.  A Ph.D. graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, she resided in the Pacific Northwest, the Bay Area, and Arizona before settling in Ohio.