She has published a scholarly book on comics titled El Comic Hispánico, a critical monograph on cartoonist Chris Ware, a youth novel titled El hombre de los dos corazones, three plays and nine books of poetry. Currently she is working on a scholarly book about the representations of marginal childhood and working on a project with artist Félix de la Concha that focuses on the memory of the Holocaust and its survivors. Merino is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Cartoon Studies. She is also the founder of the Spanish Creative Literacy Project (SCLP), an outreach project through the Spanish MFA and the undergraduate Spanish Creative Writing initiative at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.