Caryl Ann Pagel

Caryl Pagel is the author of four books of poetry and prose: Free Clean Fill Dirt, Out of Nowhere Into Nothing, Twice Told, and Experiments I Should Like Tried At My Own Death, as well as the chapbooks Paul Revere’s, Mausoleum, and Visions, Crisis Apparitions, and Other Exceptional Experiences. Her writing has appeared in Brick, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, The Mississippi Review, and The Paris Review, among other literary journals. She is the recipient of grants and residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the Ohio Arts Council. Pagel was the 2025 Lorine Niedecker Fellow and is currently working on a book about the poet Lorine Niedecker, the Great Lakes, and small press publishing.

Pagel holds a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and M.F.A.s from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a co-founder and editor at Rescue Press, an independant literary press that publishes poetry, prose, and hybrid works with a focus on generative editing and unclassifiable forms. Previously, she was a co-editor at jubilat magazine and the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.

Pagel teaches poetry, nonfiction, literary editing and publishing, and multi-genre creative writing courses to CSU undergraduates and in the NEOMFA program. Past classes have included such topics/titles as "Achive, Search Engine, Source & Map," "Community Memoir," "Noise Experiments," "Nonfiction Portraiture," and "Compost, Connection, Deep Time, Unconformity, & Heat."

More information on Pagel's creative work can be found at carylpagel.com.