Meredith M. Bailey

Meredith M. Bailey penned her first novel when she was only 10 years old and in the 5th grade. She wrote a story about vegetables that came to life on her kitchen counter-top. Although she should have shopped it around for publications, she instead returned to her middle school playground to challenge the boys to handball and field hockey matches. Little did she know she would have become one of the world’s youngest millionaires if she had just published her story before VeggieTales was released. She continued challenging boys throughout her schooldays, and excelled in her English and creative writing classes.

After her high school graduation, Meredith enrolled in college in Spring of 2002 at the University of New Orleans. A year later, she wandered into her university’s newsroom and was bitten by the journalism bug. At twenty, Meredith quickly rose in the ranks at the student newspaper, from news reporter, to Managing Editor to Editor-in-Chief, all in just one year. She published several feature length articles and editorials, challenging the administration and the university police department. After leaving the paper, Meredith continued to freelance write and design for several clients including Dialogues for Success, a life coaching company, and the Medical Center of New Orleans, Louisiana’s employee newsletter (This Week). Meredith continues to publish her writings, but they do not feature talking vegetables.

In the summer of 2005, Meredith traveled to France in order to study at the Universite de Montpellier without her checked luggage. While her bags vacationed in Amsterdam for the first ten days of her study abroad, Meredith studied medieval French literature translated into modern English and the literature of Eros(again translated into English). That’s right- she went to France to study English. When her bags returned, she wrote an essay about being without clothes for ten days, or what she likes to call it, a love-letter to France in her dirty jeans. She won the 2005 Undergraduate Writing Award that summer, a contest held by one of her most favorite college professors, Kay Murphy.

Life certainly has it’s twists and turns. After her five and a half week stay, she returned to New Orleans only to be displaced from Hurricane Katrina. She decided with her mother and god parents that she should live in Boston that semester and attend Harvard Extension. Never in her wildest imagination, and it is a wild one, did she think she would end up in Cambridge for classes. There, among other interesting classes, she took a poetry workshop with Don Share, Harvard’s Curator of Poetry. Most of her poetry can be found here.

After finally graduating in December of 2007 with her BA in English, Meredith moved to Austin, TX in order to pursue a writing career. An overly ambitious feat, perhaps, but she packed up her things and now hold s a Probationary Certification in English Language Arts, 8-12 and is working as a Substitute Teacher for Austin ISD. She is also planning on earning her certification in Special Education, EC-12 and Gifted and Talented.

What started as a child’s imagination at play turned into years of writings and ambitions. Meredith hopes to attend a low-residency university to earn her MFA in Creative Writing early next year and also hopes to publish, publish, publish!. A palm reader in Jackson Square once told her that she would be a novelist one day, and Meredith still believes that.

Meredith M. Bailey is a member of the Austin Poetry Society and the Writer’s League of Austin, and lives in an adorable one-bedroom apartment which her chemist boyfriend frequents for home made cooking and movie nights. She’s also rarely seen without her signature, olive green scarf, purchased in New Jersey at H&M.