CARYL PAGEL is the author of four books of poetry and prose: Free Clean Fill Dirt (University of Akron, poetry); Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (FC2, essays); Twice Told (University of Akron, poetry); and Experiments I Should Like Tried At My Own Death (Factory Hollow, poetry). Chapbooks include Paul Revere’s (Essay Press, essay); Mausoleum (WinterRed Press, poetry); and Visions, Crisis Apparitions, and Other Exceptional Experiences (Factory Hollow, poetry).
Pagel’s writing has appeared in AGNI, Brick, Conduit, echoverse, The Iowa Review, The Mississippi Review, New American Writing, and The Paris Review, among other journals. She is the recipient of poetry and nonfiction grants and residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, The Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the Ohio Arts Council.
Pagel was born in Iowa and grew up in southeast Wisconsin and the Chicagoland area. She holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and MFAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has taught creative writing, editing and publishing, literature, composition, and humanities courses at The University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Carthage College, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and Columbia College Chicago.
Pagel is currently an associate professor at Cleveland State University, where she teaches poetry, nonfiction, and multi-genre creative writing courses to CSU undergraduates and in the NEOMFA program. For ten years she co-edited the poetry journal jubilat. For eleven years, she was the director of the CSU Poetry Center, a publisher of poetry, prose, and translations and a site of community outreach and creative writing programming. She is a co-founder, publisher, and editor at Rescue Press, an independent small press with an interest in generative editing and unclassifiable forms.
Pagel is currently working on a book of nonfiction about Lorine Niedecker, the Great Lakes, small press publishing, Wisconsin’s history of environmental activism, and reading. With Karl Gartung, she is editing a collection of creative and critical writing in response to Niedecker’s poem, “Wintergreen Ridge.” Pagel was the recipient of the 2025 Lorine Niedecker Fellowship.
CONTACT: carylpagel [at] gmail [dot] com