Kerri Arsenault

I am a book critic, book editor at Orion magazine, contributing editor at The Literary Hub, and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. My work has appeared in Freeman’s, the Boston Globe, Down East, the Paris Review Daily, the New York Review of Books, Air Mail, and the Washington Post.

In Spring 2020 I was awarded, with UNM professor Aaron Cayer, a grant from the Architectural League of NYC, for the project American Roundtable, which commissioned ten editorial teams to prepare reports on small to mid-size communities from across the United States and to consider in those reports: economics, mobility, environmental legacies, race, class, spatial injustice, politics, and the impacts of climate change.

The Maine Humanities Council, in partnership with the Maine State Library and Maine author Gerry Boyle, selected Mill Town to be one of the recommended books for Maine’s 2021 adult summer reading program, Read ME.

I received an MFA from the New School, studied in the Master Programme in communication for development at Malmö University, Sweden, and received by BA from Beloit College. I’ve served as a mentor for PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program and for Jobs for Maine Graduates.

Member: PEN America, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, National Book Critics Circle.