Todd Hearon

Poet, playwright, author, and songwriter Todd Hearon was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. He earned his BA from Baylor University, an MA in Irish studies from Boston College, and a PhD in English/editorial studies from Boston University. Hearon’s lyric, sometimes formal poems are rich with allusion and historical reference even as they engage contemporary culture.

His poetry collection Strange Land (2010) was selected by poet Natasha Trethewey as a winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Series Open Competition Award. His second collection of poems, No Other Gods (2015), was a finalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky Editors Choice Award (Persea Books), the May Swenson Poetry Award, and the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize. David Lynn called Hearon’s most recent collection, Crows in Eden (2022), “a powerful, scorching dramatic poem” on race relations and white terrorism in this country. Hearon is the recipient of a PEN/New England “Discovery” Award, a Friends of Literature Prize from Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation, the Rumi Prize in Poetry, a Campbell Corner Poetry Award, and the Paul Green Playwrights Prize. He held the Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin and served as poet in residence at Dartmouth College and the Frost Place. A songwriter and fiction writer as well as a poet, Hearon’s first solo album, Border Radio, appeared in 2021, as did his first novella, Do Geese See God.

While at Boston University, Hearon cofounded the Bridge Theatre Company, a troupe dedicated to classical and contemporary verse drama. Active as both an actor and a director, Hearon also writes for the stage: his plays have appeared in the Kenyon Review and other journals and anthologies.  

He is an instructor of English at Phillips Exeter Academy and lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, with his wife, poet Maggie Dietz.