William Helmuth Heyen (born November 1, 1940) is an
American poet, editor, and literary critic. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Suffolk County. He received a BA from the State University of New York at Brockport; he earned a doctorate in English
from Ohio University in 1967.
He taught American literature and creative writing at his undergraduate alma mater for over 30 years before retiring in 2000.
He also briefly served as Director of the Brockport Writers Forum, a series of
readings by and video interviews with numerous American and international authors.
His work has been published in numerous literary journals and periodicals, including The
New Yorker, The Ontario Review, Harper’s, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The
Southern Review. His work has also been published in 200 anthologies, in dozens of limited-edition chapbooks and broadsides,
and on audio.
He spent the 1971-1972 academic year as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American literature in Germany. He has been awarded
NEA, Guggenheim, American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters, and other prizes.
His books of poetry include Depth of Field (1970), Noise in the Trees (1974), The Swastika Poems (1977),
Long Island Light (1979), Erika: Poems of the Holocaust (1984), Pterodactyl Rose (1991), Crazy Horse In
Stillness (1995), Pig Notes & Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry (1998), and Diana, Charles, & the Queen
(1998). He also authored a novel, Vic Holyfield and the Class of ’57 (1986).
Selections of his poems have been translated into Italian (by poet Frank Judge) and into
German.
He edited two major collections of poetry, The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets, and American Poets
in 1976. He is also the editor of September 11, 2001: American Poets Respond (2002).
Many of his manuscripts, correspondence, and his collection of first editions of modern American authors are archived in the
Rare Books Collection at University of Rochester, at Boston University, at the
Beinecke Rare
Books and Manuscripts Library at Yale University, and at the University of New
Hampshire. In 2004, he was one of the five finalists for the National Book Award for
poetry for his volume Shoah Train. Other volumes of the past few years are September 11, 2001: American Writers
Respond (2002) a collection of short stories, The Hummingbird Corporation (2003, and a collection of 30 years of
essays called Home: Autobiographies, etc. His most recent collections are Confessions of Doc Williams and Other Poems
(2006) and Titanic & Iceberg: Early Essays and Reviews (2006).
External links
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