Erika Meitner was born in New York in 1975. She attended Dartmouth College, Hebrew University, and the University of Virginia, where she received her M.F.A. as a Henry Hoyns Fellow. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Mid-American Review, The Cream City Review, and The Southeast Review. In 2001, she was the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She has worked as a dating columnist, a Hebrew school instructor, a computer consultant, a lifeguard, a documentary film production assistant, and a middle school teacher in the New York City public school system. At publication time, she was taking a hiatus from pursuing a Ph.D. in religion at the University of Virginia as the Morganstern Fellow in Judaic Studies to be a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California – Santa Cruz.

About Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore:

"Erika Meitner's is a vertiginous art — full of flash and dazzle, fire and speed, the offbeat and the upbeat, the buoyant bob and weave. She's a poet of perpetual motion, cataloguing pockets of turbulence, gospels of lust, the hours before happy — and after. Erotic, comic, quirky with wordplay and double entendre, her poems embrace the everyday, teasing the miraculous from the mundane. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Meitner casts a wry, empathic eye on the sanctities and subterfuges that keep us human. She is a true original, her affectionate attention resonating in poems that "make the world sing on cue."
—Ronald Wallace

"In Erika Meitner's Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, we enter worlds marvelously realized, our intrepid narrator an unerring guide. Whether we navigate the initiatory mysteries and indignities of adolescent urgencies, the perils and pleasures of the adult sexual quest, or the vital chaos of teaching in a Brooklyn public school, we are in the care of a poet who cares: feisty, funny, and ever alert to the telling details of a life lived in the rush and anguish of the post-modern world. These are poems like the tattoos she hymns and ponders ("Etched meat, I keep thinking/ while Tom works this buzzing needle/ around my leg.") — they mark our very being with their delicate, indelible patterns, their swoops and utterances and wild surmises."
— Gregory Orr

"The reader takes an unpredictable, exhilarating trip with the subject matter of Erika Meitner’s poems — from memories of a hormone-charged adolescence in the big city, to adult affairs of love and lust and loss; from learning to teach in a classroom filled with pubescent fireplug mirrors of oneself, to confronting one’s Jewish history at the hands of an equally fiery grandmother. But riding herd on all this range is Meitner’s distinctively snappy voice, a blend of assertiveness and vulnerability...
— Stephen Corey