Heather Altfeld

Heather Altfeld is a poet and essayist.  Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Conjunctions Magazine, Aeon Magazine, Orion Magazine of Culture and Place, ZYZZYVA, Narrative Magazine, Plume Poetry Journal, and other literary publications.  

 

Heather has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University in New York with majors in both Anthropology and Creative Writing, and an MFA in Poetry from the California State MFA consortium. She teaches in the Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities and for the Honors Program at California State University, Chico. 

 

She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for the Academic Year 2024-2025 to study saint pilgrimage among Jews and Muslims in Morocco, and is currently living in and working from Fes.

 

Altfeld's second book of poems, Post-Mortem, was selected by Eric Pankey for the 2019 Orison Prize.  Her first book, The Disappearing Theatre won the 2015 Poets at Work Prize.  Other prizes include the 2017 Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America and the 2015 recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry.  

  

Of Post-Mortem, judge Eric Pankey writes, "Post-Mortem is a brilliant, baroque, and word-crazed collection of poems. While the primary mode of the poems is elegiac (many taking as their forms obituaries, autopsies, and kaddishes), one cannot help but delight in Altfeld's reverie and in the breadth and depth of her inquiry, her exploration, her katabasis as she leads us like Virgil through a stunning and elaborate posthumous world."

 

And poet Ilya Kaminsky says of Post-Mortem:  "Rarely has there been a book about death so filled with life. Among the many elegies, dirges and songs of this book, one thing is constant, the inability to stop seeing the wail of loss, and yet, also the inability to stop seeking harmony. This tension, this duality, is what makes the book sing. I love it."

 
Heather has been a part of the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley, CA since 2008 and has received fellowships for residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Cafe Tissardmine Center for the Arts in the Sahara, AIR (Artists-in-Residence) in Sefrou, Morocco, and the Out of the Circle Foundation in Cairo, Egypt.

 

One of her favorite reviews was from a third-grade student, who said: "It’s like Heather has 1,001 stories in her head. But even if she only had one, I would want to listen to it, like, a thousand times because she tells it so good."

You can order her books here: Post-Mortem at Orison Books ($14.00) or on Amazon: Post-Mortem ($16.00) and The Disappearing Theatre