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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, editor Ecotone
Heidi Lynn Staples is a learning experience architect, writer, and editor deeply committed to fostering community engagement, connecting people through the transformative power of literature.
Resident in Ireland, she teaches creative writing at University College Dublin. She also leads Storytelling Rx, a passion project launched in response to her mother's long hospital stay, leveraging evidence-based narrative medicine to improve the healthcare experience for both providers and patients.
Previously a tenured Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, she has taught creative writing and literature for multiple organisations, including the University of Georgia, Syracuse University, Piedmont College, the Irish Writer's Centre, the National Forensic Mental Hospital of Ireland, and the Language House in Prague. She has also worked as a senior instructional designer on projects for several multinational industry leaders, providing project management and high impact learning deliverables to deadline.
She is committed to ongoing professional development and is currently enrolled in a six-month women in leadership coaching programme, as well as the Carmichael course for social enterprises and growing nonprofits. She has professional certification in university teaching, ally training, instructional design, teaching English as a foreign language, and cognitive behavioural therapy.
Heidi holds the MFA in poetry writing from Syracuse University, as well as the BA in psychology and a PhD in creative writing and English literature from the University of Georgia.
Heidi has presented her creative writing, literary criticism, and pedagogical theory at national and international conferences.
Her 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 offpoetic field research across the Mobile-Bay Watershed in Alabama.
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.
Most recently, in addition to her teaching and consulting, 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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