Kim Meikle (nee Roberts) was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1961. She earned a BFA in creative writing from Emerson College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona.
Among other honors, Kim is the recipient of a Pride Poetry Fellowship from the Arts Club of Washington, an Individual Practitioner Fellowship from Humanities DC, and a Rose Library Research Fellowship from Emory University. She was awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission on the Arts, Humanities DC, and the Jerome Foundation. Kim has been a writer-in-residence at twenty-one artist colonies and nonprofits.
For forty years, she has been a resident of Washington, DC. For the last 25, she has lived in a house that is almost at the exact geographic center of the city.
Poet
Kim is the author of seven books of poems; her newest books are Q&A for the End of the World, a collaboration with poet Michael Gushue (WordTech Editions, 2025); and Corona/Crown, a cross-disciplinary book created with photographer Robert Revere (WordTech Editions, 2023). Her other poetry books are: The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017), Fortune’s Favor: Scott in Antarctica (81 Names Press, 2015), Animal Magnetism (Pearl Editions, 2011), The Kimnama (81 Names Press, 2007), and The Wishbone Galaxy (Washington Writers Publishing House, 1994).
Individual poems of hers have been featured in over 50 anthologies. Kim has published widely in literary journals throughout the US, as well as in Brazil, Canada, England, France, India, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Switzerland. She has been included in journals starting with every letter of the alphabet, and individual poems have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, Amharic, and Mandarin.
Kim’s poems have been featured in Moving Words, which places poems on public buses in Northern Virginia; Quire, a series of hand-letterpress folios; the Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas Project; the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Project; and in podcasts sponsored by the Library of Congress, the Library of Virginia, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Editor
Kim is the editor of two poetry anthologies, By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020, selected by the DC Public Library and East Coast Centers for the Book for the 2021 Route 1 Reads program), and Full Moon On K. Street: Poems About Washington DC (Plan B Press, 2010).
Each June, Kim co-curates “DC Pride Poem-a-Day” with Jon Gann, to showcase the richness and diversity of LGBTQ+ poets from the Washington, DC region. She also co-directs the Pride Poetry Residency with Doritt Carroll at the Arts Club of Washington, which gives fellowships annually to five DC-area LGBTQ+ poets.
Kim is the founder of two literary journals. She established Beltway Poetry Quarterly in 2000 (and served as editor of the journal for twenty years, through the end of 2019). And she co-founded of the Delaware Poetry Review in 2007 (which published through 2017).
Historian
Kim’s newest book, The District’s Departed: Walking Tours of DC-Area Cemeteries, offers eleven self-guided walking tours. The definitive guidebook to celebrated and obscure cemeteries in and around the nation’s capital, The District’s Departed was published by Rivanna Books, an imprint of the University of Virginia Press, in 2026.
A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018), is part walking tour, part anthology. Preservation Magazine calls it “an impressive cross-section of writers from a variety of historical periods, ethnicities, and backgrounds.” Library Journal praises it as “The perfect accompaniment for a literature-inspired vacation in the U.S. capital.”
Kim also co-edits the web exhibit DC Writers’ Homes with Dan Vera. Her literary walking tours have been featured at the Association of University Presses annual conference, the DC Historical Studies Conference, Smithsonian Associates, and Washington Walks.