Eve Merriam
(1916–1992)

Eve Merriam felt that poetry was fun, like music and games. It was also food for the heart, the mind, and the soul. She once said "to be well fed, we need poems along with our daily bread. The poem has juicy, joyful sustenance. Don't save it for special occasions. Take that magical fruit right this minute and then share it."

Eve Merriam was born on July 19, 1916, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest of four children. Her parents owned a chain of dress shops, which inspired her lifelong interest in fashion.

Even as a child, Merriam's true passions were words and music. From an early age, she loved reading poems that were funny or that told a story. She also loved going to musicals, especially those by Gilbert and Sullivan, which were full of tongue-twisting verses. One of her favorite books as a child was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a book that fed her fascination with nonsense verse and word play. Merriam was a tap dancer, too, and she credited her love of the rhythms of language to her dancing experiences.

As a teenager, Merriam began writing poems for the school newspaper. At that time, she never dreamed of actually becoming a professional writer. She simply wrote poems because she needed to. As she once explained, "I think one is chosen to be a poet. You write poems because you must write them; because you can't live your life without writing them."

After graduating from college in the 1930s, Merriam took a job as a copywriter at an advertising agency and later at the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), where she wrote radio documentaries and scripts in verse. She also had her own radio show on modern poetry from 1942–1946. In 1947, she became a fashion copy editor at Glamour magazine.

All the while, Merriam continued writing poetry, and in 1946, she won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first volume of poetry, Family Circle. She was thrilled that the contest judge who chose her book for the award was the poet Archibald MacLeish, one of her personal heroes.

It wasn't until 1962, when she was in her forties, that Merriam published her first book of poems for children, There Is No Rhyme for Silver. The book contains 51 poems that celebrate the joy of playing around with the sounds of words, especially with rhymes. Two similar books of poetry soon followed: It Doesn't Always Have to Rhyme (1964) and Catch a Little Rhyme (1966).

Although Merriam celebrated the simple joys of everyday life in many of her poems, she also had a strong social conscience, and much of her work deals with serious social issues such as feminism, racial equality, saving the environment, and protesting the evils of war. Merriam wrote poetry and nonfiction books on these issues for both children and adults. Among these books is Independent Voices, a collection of poems about Americans past and present whom Merriam admired, including Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor in the United States, and African American leader Frederick Douglass.

Merriam was also an accomplished playwright. During the 1970s, she wrote the Obie Award-winning play The Club, a satire of men-only clubs that existed at the turn of the twentieth century. Other plays she wrote in this period include Out of Our Father's House (1975), At Her Age (1979), and And I Ain't Finished Yet (1982).

In 1981, Merriam won the National Council of Teachers of English Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children for the entire body of her work. She became a popular speaker and adviser in the teaching of poetry, and she gave many readings and workshops for students.

As always, Merriam continued to write poetry. Among the volumes she published in the 1980s are Jamboree: Rhymes for All Times, Blackberry Ink, A Sky Full of Poems, and Fresh Paint. Merriam died of cancer on April 11, 1992, at the age of 75.

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