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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
Heidi Lynn Staples’ debut collection Guess Can Gallop was selected by Brenda Hillman as a winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her recent fifth book A**A*A*A* was a grant-supported eco-project engaged with two-years of poetic field research across the Mobile-Bay Watershed.
With an academic specialization in ecopoetics and creative eco-engagement, Heidi has presented her research at national and international conferences. Her poems and critical essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Georgia Review, Ecotone, Eleven Eleven, jubilat, Ploughshares, Women's Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, Gurlesque, The Incredible Sestina Anthology, A Literary Field-guide to Southern Appalachia, The Spirit of Black Mountain College, and other venues. With the award-winning poet Amy King, she is editor and founder of Poets for Living Waters, an international digital poetry commemoration responding to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and of Big Energy Poets: When Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change (BlazeVOX 2018), for which she wrote a critical introduction.
She has taught at multiple higher-level educational institutions, including Piedmont College, the Irish Writer's Centre, the National Forensic Mental Hospital of Ireland, and the Language House in Prague. Committed to co-creation with her students, she has elaborated on her methods in taught courses, published articles, and national conferences. Heidi holds the MFA from Syracuse University, as well as the BA and PhD from the University of Georgia. Additionally, she has professional certification in Instructional Design, Teaching English as a Foreign Language, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Previously a tenured Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, she lives in Ireland and works for TWi as a senior instructional designer and will begin teaching creative writing at the University College of Dublin in spring of 2024.
She is completing Come Down, a ten-year long poetry series composed using word-banks generated from the trash that migrates across her desk, marking the cultural equivalency between the lyric moment and waste. Poems from the collection have appeared widely.
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