Discipline: Literature – poetry

Eva Heisler

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: Landstuhl, GERMANY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2018

Eva Heisler is a Maryland-born poet and art critic/historian. Her poems have been widely published in journals, including BOMB, Crazyhorse, The Indiana Review, Poetry Northwest, and Tupelo Quarterly. She has published two books of poems: Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic (Kore Press) and Drawing Water (Noctuary Press). Honors include The Nation’s “Discovery” Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award, and a residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts. A Fulbright grant brought her to Iceland in 1997 where she lived for several years, researching Icelandic art with a focus on conceptual practices. Art historical publications include “Soulful Mathematics: Poetry and Icelandic Conceptualism,” an essay exploring the relevance of Icelandic literary traditions to the emergence of Icelandic Conceptualism, and the catalog essay for Katrin Sigurðardóttir’s installation at the 2013 Venice Biennale. She is the visual arts editor of Asymptote, a journal of world literature in translation. While at MacDowell, she worked on the poetry project "Vocabulary Landscape," an exploration of the vocabularies—Icelandic, art historical, literary, political—of landscape traditions and environmental policies. She also drafted "Acres of Perhaps," a sequence focused on her struggles to reconcile the making of poetry with the construction of something called “art history.”

Studios

Mansfield

Eva Heisler worked in the Mansfield studio.

The Helen Coolidge Mansfield Studio was donated by graduates of the Mansfield War Service Classes for Reconstruction Aides. Helen Mansfield helped found the New York MacDowell Club. The small, shingled frame structure with stone foundation was originally fronted on the west side by a neat white picket fence and gate, a garden, and a stone pathway…

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