Meredith Arena is a queer writer from New York City, where she spent most of her life. She moved to Seattle/Duwamish Territory in 2011 and learned how to drive in 2015. She is an interdisciplinary teaching artist, facilitator and activist. In 2022 she was a poetry resident at Bethany Arts Community is Ossoning NY. She was also a resident at Pocoapcoco in Oaxaca Mexico for the month of September. She was the 2020 Erin Donovon fellow in poetry at Mineral School in Washington (postponed till 2021). Her work can be found in various journals including Poetry NW, Moist Poetry Journal, The Shore, Longleaf Review, Entropy, Lunch Ticket and Peatsmoke. She holds an MFA in creative writing and a Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles; a BA in cultural studies from Eugene Lang and a BFA in photography from Parson’s School of Design.

Meredith has been a teaching artist since 1999 when she began teaching photography and zine making for Elevated Urban Arts & Education, which was piloted at Robert F Wagner Institute of Arts and Technology in Queens. She worked in Bushwick Brooklyn with the Arts & Literacy Program from 2005-2011, first as a teaching artist in photography, then as site coordinator and staff trainer. As she met and learned from teaching artists in dance and theatre, her teaching practice expanded to include performance, which as a young person was central to her. She began writing more in 2008 and has since created several workshops that blend theatre, writing and movement.

In Seattle she founded and facilitated a satellite of New York’s Interdependence Project, a meditation group that met in the Central District from December 2011- December 2017. She leads poetry and other arts integrated classes for young people in both English and Spanish and creative workshops for adults and loves working with elders. She is a staff teaching artists at Arts Corps. She has taught and facilitated in many organizations in the Seattle area: Seattle Arts and Lectures’ Writers in the Schools Program, Highline College, Arts Corps, Book It Repertoire, Silverkite Community Arts, Creative Advantage, Path With Art and Hugo House’s Scribes writing camp.