Michael Heller

Michael Heller (he/him) has published more than 25 volumes of poetry, essays, memoir, and fiction, including This Constellation Is A Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010 (Nighboat Books, 2012), Dianoia (Nightboat Books, 2016), Telescope: Selected Poems (New York Review Poets, 2019), Within the Inscribed: Selected Prose and Conversations (Shearsman Books, 2021), Accidental Center (Sumac Press, 1972), In the Builded Place (Coffee House Press,1989), Wordflow (Talisman House, 1997), Exigent Futures (Salt Publishing, 2003), Living Root: A Memoir (SUNY Press, 2000), and Conviction’s Net of Branches (Southern Illinois University Press, 1985). 

He has collaborated with the composer Ellen Fishman on multimedia works, including the opera Constellations of Waking (2000), based on the life of Walter Benjamin, and the multimedia works This Art Burning (2008) and Out of Pure Sound (2010), all premiering at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. He has won grants and prizes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, and the Fund for Poetry. A collection of essays on his work, The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory, was published in 2015 by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 

Of Heller’s work, poet Forrest Gander wrote

As luminous a critic as he is a poet, Heller renews our engagement with “the mind operating in a marvel which contains the mind,” as George Oppen once put it. Through Oppen, Heller locates us and brings us home.

Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Miami Beach, Florida. He studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and earned an MA in English at New York University. A frequent traveler to Europe, he resides in New York City and spends his summers in the Colorado mountains.