Edie Meidav
Provost Professor
Faculty Bio
Educated at Yale, B.A. English Literature 1988; Mills College, M.F.A. American Literature/Creative Writing, 1993
Called an "American original" by The Daily Beast, Meidav is the author of Another Love Discourse (MIT Press/Terra Nova, 2022), Kingdom of the Young (2017, Sarabande), Lola,California (Farrar Straus, 2011/12), Crawl Space (Farrar Straus, 2007); The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (Houghton, Mifflin, 2000), and coedited Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance (UMass Press, 2017). Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Kafka Prize for Best Novel by an American Woman, the Bard Fiction Prize for a writer under 40, creative Fulbrights for work in Sri Lanka and Cyprus, and residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, Yaddo, Macdowell, Fundacion Valparaiso, Vermont Studio Center, Art/OMI and elsewhere. Her work has been called an editors' pick by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other sites. She has served as a judge for the PEN/Bingham first novel award, the NEA, Massachusetts Cultural Council, the UMass Press Juniper Prize, Yaddo, and as an editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal, a contributing editor at the International Literary Quarterly, while continuing as a senior editor at Conjunctions. She has conducted theatrical literary workshops among riven communities in zones torn by war and climate events in Sri Lanka, the Home for Cooperation in Cyprus, and elsewhere, and has taught at the Community of Writers in Lake Tahoe. She is the founder of Radius, a project linking the MFA to institutions such as NEPR, the Care Center, Hampshire County Jail, and beyond, focusing on storytelling within underheard populations.
Her background includes Amherst, Bellagio, Berkeley, Brooklyn, Colombo, Cortona, Foix, Haifa, Havana, Managua, Manhattan, Nicosia, Przmsl, Rhinebeck, Samara, Toronto.
Teaching Interests:
Exile: diaspora, immigration
Community engagement
Literature of incarceration
Hybrid literature/nonfiction
Climate refugees
Subcontinental and island literature
Micronarrative
Neuroscience/neurodivergence
Interdisciplinary work
Somatic writing
Research Areas
- Creative Writing – non/fiction, drama, film, poetry
- Fascism and the Engaged Writer
- 20th Century and Contemporary Literature
- Exile and Diaspora
- Cavafy
- Cyprus
- Interdisciplinary Arts
- Visual and Performance Culture