Biography

BA: University of Delaware; MAT: Johns Hopkins University; MFA: The Ohio State University

Heather Lanier is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. She is the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks, the full-length poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing (Monkfish 2023), and the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl (Penguin Press 2020), which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Her work has appeared in TIME, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Sun, Longreads, and elsewhere. She has received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a Vermont Creation Grant, and her TED Talk has been viewed three million times. She teaches a range of graduate and undergraduate creative writing courses. She is especially interested in the essay as a genre of experimentation, the musicality of poetry and prose, and the role of research in personal writing, and the role of the personal in researched writing.

Research Interests

Memoir, Creative Nonfiction, the Literary Essay, Experimentation in Nonfiction

Courses

Writing Creative Nonfiction, Creative Writing I & II, Memoir Workshop, The Art of the Essay, Poetry Workshop, Graduate Seminars I & II