Polly Merritt Ingraham
Photo courtesy of the author.
Polly Merritt Ingraham’s essays have been featured in The Hampshire Gazette, The Concord Monitor, Tikkun, the Boston Sunday Globe magazine, and Dartmouth Alumni
Magazine, among other outlets. A pre-election essay with the title “Hockey Moms Are More than Pitbulls with Lipstick” aired on National Public Radio in October 2008.
Her work is included in the anthology Concord Writers’ Night Out (New Hampshire Writers Project, 2018) and in the flash nonfiction anthology Fast Fierce Women (Woodhall Press, 2022). In September 2023, a short excerpt of her memoir was published in Unleash Lit and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
In 2011, Ingraham launched a blog, “The Panorama of a Pastor’s Wife,” choosing juxtaposition as its theme: the way that two things, or people, can live side-by-side with a glaring difference between them but somehow manage to harmonize too. If we were all the same, how boring life would be!
She attended workshops at the Iowa Writers Conference, Wesleyan Writers Conference, New York State Writers Institute, and the Madeline Island School of the Arts. In 2017, she was accepted into Grub Street’s Memoir Incubator program, with weekly meetings taught by Garrard Conley.
In her regular work life, she has toggled between classroom English teaching and administering job readiness and internship programs for adults and youth. Currently, Ingraham is the School-to-Career Coordinator at a New Hampshire high school. She lives with her husband in Hopkinton, New Hampshire. Unconverted is her first book.
