Heather Lanier illuminates truths about the human condition that speak to both the head and the heart.

Heather is a poet, essayist, teacher, and thrift-store shopper. She is the author of the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl (Penguin Press, July 2020), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, along with two award-winning poetry chapbooks, The Story You Tell Yourself, and Heart-Shaped Bed in Hiroshima. Her full-length poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing, was called “a powerful poetic reckoning with motherhood and religion” by Kirkus Reviews.

Heather often writes at the intersections of spirituality, motherhood, and feminism. She is the recipient of a Vermont Creation Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a New Jersey Artist’s Fellowship. Her essays and poems have been published in The Atlantic, TIME, The Sun, Salon, Brevity, Vela Magazine, Longreads, and elsewhere. Her TED talk, “’Good’ and ‘Bad’ Are Incomplete Stories We Tell Ourselves,” has been viewed three million times and translated into 18 languages. Her essay, “Out There I Have to Smile,” was among the top 10 most-read Longreads essays of 2021.

Heather works as an Assistant Professor of creative writing at Rowan University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate students. With an MA in Teaching from Johns Hopkins and an MFA in Creative Writing from Ohio State, Heather has taught Shakespeare to ninth graders in Baltimore, conversational English to housewives, ship workers, and executives in Japan, and expository and creative writing to undergraduates at places such as UC Berkeley, Miami University, and Southern Vermont College. You can receive her free newsletter, The Slow Take, where she shares occasional essays about the strange beauty of being human. CLICK HERE to sign up for free.

Check out Heather’s TED Talk