"A relentless experimenter and explorer...Heidi Lynn Staples says yes, and she does it in ways that are as interesting and compelling and intellectually rigorous as I know." -- Anna Lena Phillips Bell, editor Ecotone
Heidi Lynn Staples is a poet, essayist, and educator whose work moves between the word and the world — the place where language literally matters.
She is the author of five books of poetry: Guess Can Gallop (New Issues Poetry Prize, selected by Brenda Hillman), Dog Girl (Ahsahta), Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake (Cake Train), Noise Event (Ahsahta), and A**A*A*A* — a grant-supported ecopoetic field study of the Mobile-Bay Watershed. She is co-editor of Poets for Living Waters and Big Energy: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change (BlazeVOX). Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, Chicago Review, and Best American Poetry, among others.
She holds an MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and a PhD in creative writing and English literature from the University of Georgia. Formerly tenured Associate Professor in the MFA program at the University of Alabama, she now teaches as an Occasional Lecture in creative writing at University College Dublin, where she was awarded with the Contribution to Learning Teaching Award by the UCD College of Arts and Humanities.
By day she works as Education Manager at the Cardano Foundation — what she describes as the world's only lyric blockchain — advancing decentralisation and individual sovereignty at scale. She finds this less strange than it sounds.
Through StorytellingRx, she offers narrative strategy to high-stakes tech founders building at the edge of what it means to be human, and developmental editing to creative writers trying to say something true about inner life. The question underneath both is the same: what is irreducibly ours?
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She writes about embodied consciousness, language, and the human/machine relationship at Heidi S | Substack
She lives in Dublin with her husband, daughter, and dog. She is devoted to the idea of God and, by all accounts, makes a pretty good soda bread.
Mikey, Dublin, spring
