Heathen (Heather Derr-Smith) was born in Dallas, Texas in 1971. She spent most of her childhood in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Heather earned a B.A. in Art History at the University of Virginia, where she also took poetry workshops with Charles Wright, Rita Dove, and Greg Orr.  Derr-Smith went on to earn an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has published four books of poems, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), The Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008), Tongue Screw (Sparkwheel Press, 2016), Thrust winner the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize at Persea Books (2017) and Outskirts published by University of Akron Press, 2022.

Heathen’s work deals with trauma, both personal and geopolitical.  She is the founder and director of Cuvaj se/Take Care a nonprofit supporting writers in conflict zones and post-conflict recovery zones. Heathen leads poetry workshops with survivors of violence, war, and the international migration/refugee crisis.  She has worked in refugee camps and with IDP’s in Syria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Eastern Ukraine as well as advocacy for gun-violence survivors and refugees/migrants in the United States, Estonia, Croatia, Hungary, and Poland. Her work is heavily influenced by Holocaust Theology and Mennonite and Sufi streams of thought.

Tongue Screw by Heather Derr-Smith, published at Spark Wheel Press, 2016

Thrust by Heather Derr-Smith, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Prize, Persea Books, 2017

You can visit Derr-Smith’s Author’s page and order books at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/author/heatherderrsmith