Discipline: Literature – nonfiction

Heather Sellers

Discipline: Literature – nonfiction
Region: St. Petersburg, FL
MacDowell Fellowships: 2021

Heather Sellers’ short story collection, Georgia Underwater, won a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers award. Recipient of an NEA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, she has published fiction, poetry, and nonfiction in The Sun, Agni, Field, Five Points, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, The Best American Essays, and numerous other anthologies, journals, and magazines. Her popular craft guide for writers, The Practice of Creative Writing (Macmillan Bedford St. Martins), is in its fourth edition. Her award-winning memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know (Riverhead) tells the story of her experience with prosopagnosia (face blindness). She’s published four collections of poetry, Drinking Girls and Their Dresses (Ahsahta), The Boys I Borrow (New Issues Press), The Present State of the Garden (Lynx House), and Field Notes from the Flood Zone (BOA Editions). In the Heyward Studio at MacDowell, she worked on chapters from a new memoir, In the Garden after the Storm, and poems for a new collection, Where to Live. She also interviewed local foresters for an essay on insects. She teaches poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid/experimental writing at the University of South Florida, and divides her time between St. Petersburg, FL, and Manhattan.

Portrait by Steven Le

Studios

Heyward

Heather Sellers worked in the Heyward studio.

The Lodge Annex, a wing on the west side of the men’s dormitory (The Lodge), was completed in 1926. Initially intended as an apartment for a caretaker, the space was soon repurposed as a live-in studio for writers. In recognition of a major endowment gift from the DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Foundation, Lodge Annex was…

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