Constance Merritt is an American poet. Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1966, and educated at the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock. She is also the winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Book Award. In 2001, Merritt received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. From 2003 to 2005, Merritt served as the Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College. In 2005 she received Arkansas's Porter Prize. Merritt lives in Louisville, Kentucky.