Erika Meitner's first collection of poems, Inventory at the All-night Drugstore, won the 2002 Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry from Anhinga Press. Her second collection, Ideal Cities, was a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series and was published by Harper Collins in 2010. Her next book, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, was published by Anhinga Press in 2011. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the MFA program at the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow, and also earned an M.A. in Religion as a Morgenstern Fellow in Jewish Studies. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2011, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Best African American Essays 2010, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals and anthologies. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program.