Heather Derr-Smith

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Heather Derr-Smith

Heather Derr-Smith is an American poet. She was born in Dallas, Texas in 1971 and spent her early childhood in Los Angeles, California. Her family then moved to Fredericksburg, Virginia where she spent her middle and high school years. She studied at the University of Virginia, earning a B.A. in Art History. At U.V.A. she also took poetry workshops with Gregory Orr, Charles Wright and Rita Dove.

She went on to earn her MFA in Poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she studied with Marvin Bell, Jorie Graham, Jim Galvin, and Mark Doty. Her first book, "Each End of the World" was published by Main Street Rag Press in 2005. The book was called "Astonishing" and "a devastating performance" by Mark Doty. The poems are about the 1991-1996 wars in the former Yugoslavia (Yugoslav Wars), where Derr-Smith volunteered in a refugee camp in Gasinci, Croatia in the summer of 1994.

Derr-Smith's second collection of poems, "The Bride Minaret" was published at the University of Akron Press. It was selected by Elton Glaser for the Akron Series in Poetry in 2008. It was edited by Mary Biddinger, who writes, "Heather Derr-Smith's second collection journeys to the rough core of desire, creating and destroying binaries along the way." The poems are about personal and global issues of exile and identity. There is also a strong sense of place and connection to the natural environment. Many of the poems were written in Damascus, Syria where Derr-Smith was interviewing Iraqi and Palestinian refugees during the Iraq war troop surge of 2007. Denise Duhamel writes "The Bride Minaret is a book of emotional, literary, and cultural substance. As Mendelson wrote of Auden: the poems bear witness to the close connection between intelligence and love."

Her third collection, Tongue Screw (Spark Wheel Press, 2016) takes a more personal turn. Stacey Waite writes, "Derr-Smith's poems are imagistically rich and unflinchingly honest as they unfold, one after the other, the thin and permeable boundaries between war and desire, violence and beauty, politics and the inexplicable motion of experience>" . Lee Ann Roripaugh says, "the poems in Tongue Screw are fiercely golrious in their evocation of troubled memory, gritty desire, and love's holy ghost."