Heather McHugh

Heather McHugh was born to Canadian parents in San Diego, California, in 1948. She was raised in Virginia and educated at Harvard University. Most recently, McHugh published Eyeshot (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), a book of new poems. Her previous books of poetry include The Father of the Predicaments, Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (Wesleyan University Press, 1994), which won both the Boston Book Review‘s Bingham Poetry Prize and the Pollack- Harvard Review Prize, was a Finalist for the National Book Award, and was named a “Notable Book of the Year” by the New York Times Book Review; Shades (1988); To the Quick (1987); A World of Difference(1981); and Dangers (1977). She is also the author of Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993), and four books of translation: a version of Euripides’s Cyclops for Oxford University Press (1999); Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan and Because the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova (both with husband Nikolai Popov, published in 1989 and 2000 respectively) and D’Après Tout: Poems by Jean Follain (1981). Her honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Glottal Stop was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and in 2001 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Heather McHugh teaches as Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle has taught as a core faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She held visiting appointments at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa, at the University of California at Berkeley, and at the University of Texas in Austin.