About

The Meridel LeSueur Family Circle

We are members of the family of Meridel LeSueur—her daughter, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. We are the ones in our big, beautiful family who take care of Meridel’s groundbreaking legacy, working to keep more of her books available, taking care of contracts, permissions, and requests about her work. We’ve organized this website to share and update information about her life, her writing, and the timeless wisdom that shines through it all.

Meridel wrote for most of her life. She would say to us that to learn to be a writer, the most important thing to do is to write—to write something every day and work hard to communicate. She kept a journal from the time she was a teenager until she died. Her one hundred and thirty-three volumes of journals (from 1918–1991) are now at the Minnesota Historical Society and they are a treasure.

Her published and unpublished work often began with the seeds of ideas, images, notes, and passages she explored in her journals. She wrote about what she knew. Her writing grew directly from what she saw, heard, felt, and thought. She had the ability to record and report what she witnessed and observed, bringing these insights into her soaring, profound poetry and prose. She evoked a personal and at the same time global understanding in her readers. She wrote history books, children’s books, political arguments, reportage, and books about writing. She wrote poetry, novels, short stories, articles, and collections of works that defied categorization and genre pigeonholing. At the heart of her work is love for the masses of working and poor people, a pathfinding militant feminism, and an all-embracing vision of revolutionary change.  She was always writing and the body of her work is as relevant today as it was when she first wrote. We are committed as a family to keep her rich, insightful prose and poetry vibrantly present in our world today.


We’d love to hear from you!

Contact us with questions, your responses to Meridel’s work, or a remembrance.  One of us will respond to your shortly.

email: info@meridellesueur.org

Comments are closed.