Meredith Trede

Meredith Trede’s poetry in Field Theory is thick with lives; when you open the book it’s as if you’ve walked into a crowded room. She makes portraits with great musicality and tenderness, sometimes in laughter, often in grief. Her poems distill experience; her wry sense of humor keeps simplification at bay. She invites readers into her story, not through a linear and detailed retelling, but with glimpses that encourage them to recall or imagine their own parallel stories, and to draw their own conclusions. These are poems of ironic detachment and passionate engagement. Meredith has lived and worked in major U.S. cities, small rural towns, and in the suburbs. She draws on all these experiences with poems that see the “small town” embedded in lives in the towering city, the common experiences of life regardless of the setting. Her chapbook, Out of the Book, appeared in Desire Path, the inaugural volume of The Quartet Series. She was awarded the James J. Nicholson Political Poetry Prize. Meredith is a founder of Toadlily Press which published perfect bound books, featuring four poets’ chapbooks, for ten years. Toadlily poets won Pushcart Prizes, NEA Grants, residency fellowships, and state and regional awards, including the Washington State Poet Laureateship.