Merrie Snell is an American-born writer, artist, and academic based in Northumberland, UK. Her fiction and poetry appear in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in the US and UK, including The Bridport Prize Anthology 2025, Anthropocene, New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, AGNI, Cimarron Review, among others. Her work has also been shortlisted for various awards and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Graduate Program in Creative Writing (The Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and a PhD in music from Newcastle University. Her book, Lipsynching, on sound recording and the (dis)embodied voice was published by Bloomsbury Academic in their Study of Sound series (series editor: Michael Bull). She has exhibited her sound and video installations in galleries and art centres in the US, UK, and Sweden.

Snell is a writer of daily life touched by the ineffable. Of coming to terms; rejecting expectations; of the fluid life of art and nature, the mundane and extraordinary, the violent world and the preservation of a dearly sought beauty. And music. Especially music. Her work explores the formative power of song: Irving Berlin, The Beatles, Fred Astaire, Appalachian balladry. On repeat.

During her Cove Park micro-residency, she will be working on a novel about, among many things, family identity, the subtle politics of music pick-up sessions, and gun violence in the US.