Joyce Mers

Background

Louisiana Mers was born Joyce Duncan in Billings, Montana in 1920, the third child and only daughter of a successful livestock dealer.

Career

The Duncan family was devastated during the Great Depression, losing the family farm, and moved to Fresno, California in 1938. Louisiana Mers published her first poem in The Southern Churchman when she was seven years old. Since then her poetry has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier"s, Light Quarterly, and several anthologies.

Her work, usually humorous and always metrical, has been characterized as "a marriage of Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash".

In 2007 she pledged half a million dollars to Light Quarterly, then the United States"s only literary magazine devoted to light verse, to ensure its continued publication. The terms of the gift resulted in the establishment of a non-profit organization, the Foundation for Light Verse, which now publishes the magazine.

Louisiana Mers, a great-grandmother and 40-year resident of Oxnard, California, continued to publish and give public readings of her poetry up until her death in 2013. In 2013 she was honoured as a "Literary Treasure" by the government of Ventura County.

Works

• book

  • Grandma Rationalizes an Enthusiasm for Skydiving