Christopher Merrill in Conversation with Kalpna Singh-Chitnis
Christopher Merrill stands as one of the most influential literary figures of his generation, distinguished not only as a poet, writer, and translator, but also as an educator and cultural ambassador. From 2000 to 2025, he served as Director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where his leadership extended far beyond academia. In this role, he conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries, fostering dialogue across borders and languages. His commitment to cultural exchange was recognized through his service on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011 to 2018, and by his appointment to the National Council on the Humanities by President Barack Obama in 2012.
Christopher Merrill’s writing emerges from his deep engagement with history, place, conflict, and faith, shaped by years of travel and attentive listening to diverse voices across cultures. His poetry and prose often inhabit borderlands—both geographical and moral—where ceremony and violence, devotion and doubt, coexist and language becomes a vessel for memory, loss, and resilience. The intensity of his work is evident in Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavon Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, as well as in his six books of nonfiction, including Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. Widely translated and read across continents, Merrill’s body of work stands as a vital bridge between personal testimony and global experience, earning him honors such as the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations.
After serving as Director of the International Writing Program for twenty-five years, Christopher Merrill chose to step away from the position. What prompted that decision? At a moment when America stands at a crossroads—baffled and confused, uncertain yet hopeful—I meet Christopher Merrill for one of the most important interviews I have conducted in recent years. Let’s unpack it all with him, listen to the sounds of his words—spoken and unspoken, and decipher their meanings.
KSC: Welcome back to Life and Legends, Christopher. First of all, congratulations on receiving the Ottaway Award by Words Without Borders. Looking back on your career as a writer, translator, and cultural diplomat, what does this particular recognition mean to you at this stage?
CM: Thank you, Kalpna. I was very grateful to Words Without Borders for this honor—though it arrived at a particularly fraught moment for me, the U.S. Department of State having just terminated nearly $1 million in grants to the International Writing Program (IWP), which I had the good fortune to direct from 2000 until 2025. Our partnership with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) dated back to the IWP’s origins in 1967, and I am still coming to terms with the dissolution of what was for me a defining set of relationships with diplomats and civil servants, who tutored me in the rudiments of foreign policy, the federal government, and the art of the possible. I miss the daily back-and-forth on all manner of things, which inspired a number of creative projects, cultural diplomacy missions, and friendships. Maybe I will write about that.
KSC: You’ve had a remarkable career as both a writer and an advocate for international literary exchange. How do you balance your own creative work with the demands of leading a global program like the International Writing Program? What are you writing now?
I am writing about my first ancestor in the New World, Roger Williams, the Puritan divine who enshrined the idea of liberty of conscience in the royal patent he secured in 1643 for the Colony of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations.
CM: Good question. Because I worked for a long time as a freelance journalist covering the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia, I learned to write in less than ideal circumstances, and those lessons shaped my approach to writing during my tenure at the IWP, which involved constant international travel. I grew accustomed to writing on transoceanic flights, between meetings, emails, and phone calls, early in the morning or late at night. At any given moment I might have drafts of several poems in various states of completion open on my laptop or on a legal pad, as well as different chapters of the biography I am writing about my first ancestor in the New World, Roger Williams, the Puritan divine who enshrined the idea of liberty of conscience in the royal patent he secured in 1643 for the Colony of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations. He wrote an extraordinary book about the Narragansett Indians, A Key into the Language of America, which is at once a phrase book of the Narragansett language and an early example form of ethnographic studies, each chapter containing phrases integral to, say, hunting and fishing rituals, marriage ceremonies and funerals, eating and entertainment; his promotion of the separation of church and state was key to the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution—that is, our experiment in liberty, which the Trump administration is working overtime to end.
KSC: The IWP at the University of Iowa has been called a cornerstone of cultural diplomacy. What is its primary mission today, especially amid global ideological divides and budget cuts?
CM: If the IWP’s practice of cultural diplomacy can be described as the exchange of literary ideas, information, and experiences—a forging of connections among distinguished writers from diverse lands who work in a variety of genres, forms, and hybrid methods—then it may be useful to recall our administrative origins as an outgrowth of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which Paul Engle directed for nearly twenty-five years before he and the Chinese novelist Nieh Hualing established the IWP in 1967. Cultural diplomacy was for the better part of a century an essential element of American foreign policy until the second Trump administration began to systematically attack our neighbors, allies, the media, law firms, and universities; destroy our lead humanitarian agency, USAID, which has already caused the deaths of some 600,000 people, two-thirds of whom were children; and dismantle our cultural diplomacy infrastructure—a course of action that will, I fear, have disastrous consequences not only for Americans but for the rest of the world.
…the loss of nearly $1 million in grants approved by Congress, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio decided “no longer align[ed] with the national interest,…”
KSC: With the significant cuts in grants from the U.S. Department of State, what challenges does the IWP face today, and how do you envision its future? Do you anticipate being able to continue all of IWP’s programs in the days ahead?
CM: The immediate challenge for what would be my final fall residency concerned funding: the loss of nearly $1 million in grants approved by Congress, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio decided “no longer align[ed] with the national interest,” forced us to rely on private fundraising, bilateral agreements we had secured with foreign ministries of culture, NGOs, and philanthropic organizations, and a generous gift from Hugh F. Culverhouse, Jr., a lawyer and investor from Florida. This challenge will not vanish. Meanwhile the severing of our longstanding relationships with U.S. embassies and consulates has left us without critical partners in identifying candidates for our fall residency. Hence I proposed to the network of UNESCO Cities of Literature that they consider recommending writers to us, and I hope this will help to fill that void.
Image: The University of Iowa
KSC: Considering the cuts to the IWP’s funding, how can other agencies, institutions, or even individuals support its mission? What kinds of partnerships or collaborations do you believe could sustain and expand the program in the years ahead?
CM: Donations are always welcome. And I hope my efforts to secure Iowa City’s designation as the third UNESCO City of Literature will broaden the IWP’s reach around the world, since sixty more cities have now joined what has become a dynamic and productive network. My successor at the IWP will no doubt look for other funding opportunities and institutional partnerships, and perhaps sometime in the future wiser heads will lead the White House and the State Department, remembering the importance of cultural diplomacy to the security of the United States.
Conversations central to IWP residencies have certainly grown more difficult in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the events of October 7th, and the Israeli war on Gaza.
KSC: Writers from war-torn countries often bring complex perspectives to the table. How does the IWP navigate sensitive dialogues, for example, between Israeli and Palestinian writers, and Russian and Ukrainian writers, while ensuring that all voices are respected and amplified? How has the participation of writers from Middle Eastern countries been affected by the current Israel–Gaza conflict, and what role can programs like the IWP play in fostering cultural diplomacy during such times of intense polarization? In your view, has the line between international politics and cultural diplomacy become increasingly blurred in recent years?
CM: Conversations central to IWP residencies have certainly grown more difficult in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the events of October 7th, and the Israeli war on Gaza. To take one example: In the first class of our undergraduate course called International Literature Today, I tell a story dating from the 2001 residency about a remarkable debate between the Israeli fiction writer Etgar Keret and the Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan. Writers from the residency assembled in the common room of the Iowa House Hotel on a Sunday morning to listen to their colleagues trade arguments, ideas, and questions for more than four hours, without ever raising their voices. Neither Etgar nor Ghassan changed their political views, but the civility they modeled had a salubrious effect on our subsequent conversations during that fraught period after 9/11. Fast forward to the fall of 2023: prior to October 7th I might have described the cohort in that residency as one of the more harmonious during my tenure. But Hamas’s attack on an outdoor music festival in Israel, neighboring towns, military bases, and kibbutzim changed everything. As it happened, an Israeli poet in residence was scheduled to read at Prairie Lights Bookstore the next day, and I learned from her that her best friend had lost her daughter in the assault. It was not long before the poet decided to return home before the end of the residency, fearing for the safety of her children and feeling distraught that her fellow writers were shunning her. We had invited a Palestinian poet from Gaza that fall, but he had not been granted a visa, and now in the writers’ WhatsApp group he streamed videos documenting damage from the air campaign conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces—which heightened tensions among the writers. For our last meeting as a group the chair of the English department made a presentation on the historiography of what we call the Writing University, and then we turned to the burning issue of the day—the war in Gaza. A South Asian writer kicked off the discussion with a question to me: Do you remember the story you told us about an Israeli writer punching out a Palestinian poet? I stared at her. What? I said. You have that story exactly backwards. Things disintegrated after that exchange, which shook me to the core. A story I considered to be a touchstone of the IWP had been turned on its head. As a practitioner of cultural diplomacy I could not help but regard this unfortunate development as a sign of the times; difficult conversations are ever harder to manage in our increasingly polarized societies, and yet I still believe we have no choice but to find common ground, notwithstanding the fact that the lines between international relations and cultural diplomacy have become ever more blurred.
KSC: Your book On the Road to Lviv reflects on Ukraine, a country at the heart of one of today’s most devastating wars. What compelled you to write this book, and how has your understanding of Ukraine’s cultural identity evolved through your time there?
CM: I started to write this book in 2006, during a cultural diplomacy mission to Ukraine soon after the Orange Revolution. In an unheated van, in the coldest winter in memory, I was traveling from Kyiv to Lviv, with a driver, a local Embassy staffer and a Ukrainian novelist who was also an IWP alumna. The staffer was going through menopause, for every few minutes she would roll down her window and let in blasts of the coldest air I had ever experienced. The novelist and I emptied our clothes from a suitcase and a duffel bag and draped them over ourselves—in vain. I don’t think I have ever been so cold. Eventually I decided to take notes on what I was seeing in the snow-swept landscape, which seemed to fall into iambic pentameter lines, and after a while Adam Zagajevski’s brilliant poem “To Go to Lvov” came to mind. I added notes for the duration of my mission, and when I returned home I worked on it from to time until I led a second mission to Ukraine in the winter of 2105, not long after the Revolution of Dignity and the Russian occupation of Crimea and parts of the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk. I took more notes on our visits to Kyiv and Kharkiv, which would find their way into what was becoming a book-length poem. I conjured memories of Zagajewski reading in Slovenia, meditated on the relationship between poetry and prayer, and read histories of and poetry from Ukraine; when Russia invaded Ukraine on my 65th birthday I felt compelled to document the war in what was for me a new way of bearing witness to tragedy, having covered the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia as a freelance journalist, not a poet. My service on the Ukraine Coordination Group for the Artist Protection Fund, finding safe havens for Ukrainian writers at risk, fed into the poem; also the stories I heard that spring about the tens of thousands of refugees who had fled to Poznań, Poland, where I was a Fulbright Senior Specialist at Adam Mickiewicz University. I had undertaken annual missions to Russia from 2009 until just before COVID-19, and now I was hearing other versions of truths uncovered over the centuries of the enmity between Russia and Ukraine. If my poem captures some of the complexity underlying this terrible conflict and the pathos of its victims, then perhaps that may be enough.
KSC: More broadly, how do you see current wars from Ukraine to the Middle East, reshaping literature written today? Are writers responding differently compared to past generations?
CM: Every generation of writers responds in its own way to the war stories that shape their lives, and ours is no exception. During the Third Balkan War, for example, if I wished to communicate with the outside world from Sarajevo, the besieged capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was over a satellite phone, which cost $45/minute to use. By way of contrast, when I taught a creative writing workshop twenty years later to U.S. service members in Kabul, one GI wrote a story about arguing with his girlfriend over his iPhone when a shell fired by Taliban forces flew overhead. He ducked behind an armored vehicle to try to figure out where the shell might be coming from, all the while continuing to argue with her until she finally said, What’s the matter with you? The soldier added ruefully that she was no longer his girlfriend. If in Sarajevo I thought it was important to capture in my writings some of the jokes I daily heard, which served as antidotes to the sheer terror of the siege, I realized in Afghanistan and Iraq that faithful portraits of life in these 21st-century wars required new forms of witnessing, some of which made their way into the prose poems that Marvin Bell and I wrote back and forth over a decade, in the two plus volumes of After the Fact we managed to complete before he passed away in 2020. George Orwell in the Spanish Civil War; René Char, Richard Wilbur, Czesław Miłosz, and Anna Swir in World War II; Tim O’Brien, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Frances Fitzgerald in the Vietnam War—these and many other poets and writers not only shaped my thinking about the art of war writing but taught me how to make some sense of what is fundamentally impossible to understand. If it is true that there are numberless elements common to conflicts the world over, it is also the case that each day in any war makes new demands on writers hoping to bear witness to what they smell, taste, and see, hear and record.
What have I learned from the Israeli, Palestinian, Russian, and Ukrainian writers I had the good fortune to meet during my travels in their lands, host in the IWP, and come to know through their writings? That exile is neither unusual nor as traumatic as one might fear. That war wounds, physical and psychic, will color their work from here on out. That some of what they write may well stand the test of time, preparing future readers to live with a pain that never goes away.
Christopher Merrill in Western Ukraine
KSC: Do you envision a lasting peace between Russia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Palestine? If so, what conditions might make that possible? Please share your insights, based on your travel experiences in these regions and your interactions with writers who have lived through these conflicts.
CM: Richard Holbrooke’s success in securing the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995 to bring an end to the Bosnian War depended, first, upon a robust display of force by NATO, which convinced the leaders of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia that there was nothing to be gained by continuing to fight, and then upon the skillful negotiations of a career diplomat who had devoted considerable time and resources to understanding the contours, textures, and dimensions of a war, which lasted for three and a half years and cost the lives of a hundred thousand Bosnians. To think that a just peace can be established in Ukraine or Gaza and the West Bank by a pair of ill-informed real estate developers like Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner is both ludicrous and dangerous. For it is difficult to imagine establishing a durable peace between nations that regard their enemies as existential threats absent real security guarantees, the drawing of fair borders, wrongdoers brought to justice, infrastructures rebuilt, and reparations paid to victims. None of these terms of art appear to be on the table in the negotiations that Wikoff and Kushner are conducting between Russia and Ukraine on the one hand, and on the other, Israelis and Palestinians—which is hardly surprising, given the Trump administration’s apparent interest in exploring whatever commercial possibilities might be available. What will it take for these negotiations to truly succeed? Negotiators who are determined to play the role of honest brokers—a seeming impossibility with this crowd.
What have I learned from the Israeli, Palestinian, Russian, and Ukrainian writers I had the good fortune to meet during my travels in their lands, host in the IWP, and come to know through their writings? That exile is neither unusual nor as traumatic as one might fear. That war wounds, physical and psychic, will color their work from here on out. That some of what they write may well stand the test of time, preparing future readers to live with a pain that never goes away.
KSC: Do you believe literature can influence the narratives of conflict and resistance in meaningful ways, or is its power more in preserving memory for the future?
CM: It has been reported that a single photograph in the summer of 1995, on the front page of The New York Times, of a young Bosnian woman who had hanged herself from a tree in the woods to avoid being raped and murdered by the Serbian soldiers who were massacring more than eight thousand men and boys in Srebrenica led Vice President Al Gore’s oldest daughter, Karenna, to ask him when the Clinton administration was going to stop the Serbian atrocities. It was not long before NATO destroyed the Serbian positions in the mountains surrounding Sarajevo, and in a few short weeks Holbrooke was preparing Wright Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio to receive the men who over the next months would bring an end to the war. And history is replete with examples of books, paintings, and symphonies that made a difference in the daily lives of people caught up in war, from the bracing effect that the publication of Eliot’s Little Gidding had on Londoners during the Blitz, to the clarifications about the nature of war that Picasso offered in his majestic Guernica, to the courage that Shostakovich instilled in the audience during a performance of his “Leningrad Symphony” a year into the siege of that city. Wartime literature can document, preserve, translate, and transform into poetry and stories the facts and dreams and memories of those who did or did not survive the conflagration. That should be enough, no?
Christopher Merrill in Iraq
I took my bearings from W. S. Merwin, for whom I had the pleasant task of housesitting his botanical preserve in Maui on four occasions in the early 1990s… He told me that when he was an undergraduate at Princeton he visited Ezra Pound when he was confined at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Pound gave him two pieces of advice: 1) write seventy-five lines a day and 2) translate. When I asked him if he could really write seventy-five lines every day, he said, Of course not. But you can always translate.
KSC: You’ve translated and engaged deeply with voices from other cultures. How has translation shaped your worldview as a writer and as a cultural ambassador?
CM: For my year-long Old English course in graduate school I translated riddles, “The Wanderer,” and “The Dream of the Rood” before turning to Beowulf, one hundred lines of which we were supposed to translate every night—which thrilled me. Searching for musical equivalents for words and phrases composed more than a millennium ago schooled me in the art of the impossible. For translation is impossible—and essential to literary discourse. I took my bearings from W. S. Merwin, for whom I had the pleasant task of housesitting his botanical preserve in Maui on four occasions in the early 1990s. I was covering the Balkan Wars and sometimes I came straight from a war zone, which made my time in William’s presence before he left for reading tours on the mainland all the more meaningful. He told me that when he was an undergraduate at Princeton he visited Ezra Pound when he was confined at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Pound gave him two pieces of advice: 1) write seventy-five lines a day and 2) translate. When I asked him if he could really write seventy-five lines every day, he said, Of course not. But you can always translate. Adopting a similar approach, I have co-translated fifteen books, including André Breton’s Constellations, a collection of prose poems based on Joan Miró’s gouaches; works by the Slovenian poets Aleš Debeljak and Tomaž Šalamun; and a variety of books by contemporary Korean poets and classical Korean texts. Translating gives me a chance to inhabit the minds of poets far removed from me in terms of language, country, customs, and time, and when I try to imagine their creative practices I find my own linguistic resources expanding and my powers of empathy deepening. I like to think each poem I bring into English gives what Joseph Brodsky called a boost to the language.
KSC: In an era when nationalism and censorship are surging in many countries, what gives you hope about the ability of literature to cross borders?
CM: Think of all the world-class writers who courageously produced extraordinary work in the face of oppression, censorship, and threats to their lives—this gives me hope. Reading the poems of Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska, Tadeusz Różewicz, and Ryszard Krynicki, four Polish poets who wrote brilliantly during the repressive Soviet era, is not only bracing but instructive. For they teach us what it means to bear up in dark times. Likewise the work of scores of poets and writers I hosted from Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Malawi, Myanmar, Pakistan, Palestine, Russia, Rwanda, Turkey, Ukraine, and other places—another reason why we need to train translators to bring more of their writings into English.
I was taken aback by their demands for ever more evidence of all the ways in which the IWP made America safer, stronger, and more prosperous. We were advised to put together a one-page fact sheet, which among other things highlighted three IWP writers who went on to win the Nobel Prize. This prompted one official to ask why there were no Americans on the list—which left me puzzled. I replied that our office is located in a Victorian mansion across the street from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which has produced so many prize-winning writers that Iowa City is known as Pulitzer Town.
KSC: What advice would you offer to young writers, especially those from conflict zones, who hope to use literature as a tool for dialogue and peace-building?
CM: Write the best poems and stories that you can. The rest will take care of itself.
KSC: Is there a message you would like to share with the literary community—something you feel is important but rarely discussed or addressed?
CM: “First you read, then you write,” Emerson advised—to which I would add, translate.
KSC: Why did you decide to step down from the director’s position at the International Writing Program?
I began negotiating the terms of my retirement during the summer of 2024, thinking that after twenty-five years of directing the IWP it was time for someone younger to chart the next quarter-century of connecting writers from around the world. Trump’s reelection complicated matters, and in the first weeks after his landing team arrived at the State Department to begin the transition to the new administration I was taken aback by their demands for ever more evidence of all the ways in which the IWP made America safer, stronger, and more prosperous. We were advised to put together a one-page fact sheet, which among other things highlighted three IWP writers who went on to win the Nobel Prize. This prompted one official to ask why there were no Americans on the list—which left me puzzled. I replied that our office is located in a Victorian mansion across the street from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which has produced so many prize-winning writers that Iowa City is known as Pulitzer Town. After the termination of our grants I decided to host a scaled-back residency, hoping to steer the IWP into the next harbor from which my successor will set sail. What time I have left on earth I want to spend in New Mexico, writing.
POEMS BY CHRISTOPHER MERRILL
Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is a poet, writer, filmmaker and Editor-in-Chief of Life and Legends
