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Articles by Christopher Merrill
Early conviction: How alternative real estate moved into the institutional mainstream
Americas - July/August 1, 2026: Vol. 38, Number 7 To read this full article you need to be subscribed to Institutional Real Estate Americas Sign inStart Your Free Trial NowView Purchase Options When Harrison Street started in 2005, alternative real estate was largely viewed as a collection of specialized sectors outside the four traditional property types of office, multifamily, retail and industrial.
Poet Christopher Merrill on Flares, a book of prose poems.
The richly imagined fables, vignettes, and prose poems of Flares reveal the elementary strangeness of this world. Here is the improvised travel record of a poet haunted by history, who documents what he discovers in foreign lands with an exacting and hallucinatory eye. Composed in transit, on diplomatic missions to scores of countries, Flares will endure in the reader’s imagination as a series of signals in the night, illuminating the hidden corners of our time here on earth.
The Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature
Named in honor of James H. Ottaway, Jr., the first board chair of Words Without Borders, the Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature recognizes individuals who have taken extraordinary steps to advance international literature in English translation. In accordance with WWB’s mission, the awardee is selected on the basis of their efforts to build cultural understanding by advancing popular awareness of international writers and literatures.
“Elegy with Two Trees,” “On Eschatology,” “Lines for the Winter Solstice,” and “Lines for the New Year (1)”
Elegy with Two Trees In memory of Larry Levis (1946-1996) Dengue, and dysentery, and near-death Experiences in careening cars, A midtown bar, a besieged capital— Of my time here below I should remember More than the accidents of history, Which I somehow survived.
Mbuze
Photo by Chandler Cruttenden on Unsplash Ten-year-old Adaugo woke under the udala tree, gasping. The voice of her mother echoed in her thoughts. She had not been sleeping well since the flood and had taken to nodding off in the shade of this tree. From where she sat, she saw a woman struggling to bathe her son as the baby played with the water. Another woman sat in front of her tent, rocking herself back and forth as she breastfed her baby. Men filled different corners of the camp, discussing.
After the Fact - Air/Light
Editor’s Note: What follows are two sets of excerpts from Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill’s extended collaboration After the Fact, in which the poets shared a conversation on the page in the form of a series of linked, single paragraph prose poems. The first thirteen of these works, or “paras,” are from the as yet unpublished After the Fact: If & When; the final four are from After the Fact: Here & Now, a subsequent volume left unfinished at Bell’s death.
Marvin Bell: A Discussion of his Career with Christopher Merrill and David St. John
A few months after the death of Marvin Bell, Air/Light editor David L. Ulin sat down with Bell’s friend and collaborator Christopher Merrill and his friend and former student David St. John to discuss the poet’s work and legacy. We are please to bring that conversation to you as part of AirLight‘s tribute to Bell.
On Literary Awards, Neustadt and Nobel
FEBRUARY 2, 2021 THE SWEDISH ACADEMY’S awarding of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature to Louise Glück, “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal,” brought an end to the annual cycle of speculation about who would win the biggest prize of all — speculation fueled in part by bookmakers laying odds on the top contenders.
Emily Dickinson was right: ‘Hope is a strange invention’
Hope is the first word of three different poems by Emily Dickinson, the first of which famously continues, “is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.” This Dickinson poem appears to date from the beginning of the Civil War, when hope was in short supply in Union households, presumably including her family’s home in Amherst, Mass.
Pursuing Racial Justice
By Christopher Merrill, director, International Writing Program Human beings are meaning-making creatures, and in tumultuous periods of history many turn to the arts for solace, instruction, and delight. Poets and novelists, painters and sculptors, composers and choreographers—all seek to frame their particular experiences in enduring works of art, which can help us articulate those bewildering questions that in extremis may beset us at any moment.
Against Silence - Image Journal
A note from the author: “I was sharply attuned to a universal catastrophe, which was not just a fear of war,” the Polish poet and essayist Czesław Miłosz wrote in Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (1968), recalling his stay in Paris in the winter of 1934-35.
Redeeming the Time
Confession This is terror and this must be how it happens—how need alchemizes into belief. On Lectio Divina, Counterclockwise By Karen An-Hwei Lee Poetry | Issue 89 Both hands of a clock rotate counterclockwise as I read backwards—you, give, leave, I, peace. You gave us peace. You left us peace. You left us for a little while until you returned, glorified in an era without aerial shots, prior to montage. A figurative clock I mentioned is anachronistic.
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