Kythe Heller

Kythe Heller (b.1980) is a poet, essayist, performer, filmmaker, and scholar currently based in Cambridge, MA. In mixed-genre poems, essays, and pieces for collaborative and solo performance, Heller experiments with a grounding of poetics in textual, spatial and performative practices that re-orient art-making as a practice of consciousness: In what ways can our writings become sites of resistance, sites of evolution, parts of an array of realizing new social and ecological relationships by considering how to use language to radically change one’s way of being in the world? She is the author of the poetry collection Firebird (Arrowsmith, 2020), and two chapbooks, Immolation (Monk Honey) and Thunder (WICK: Harvard Divinity School). Her recent poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Tricycle, The American Poetry Review, POOL, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Lyric, Salamander, American Demographics, and other journals, and her poetry chapbook Immolation was a finalist for the Walt McDonald First Book Prize from Texas Tech UP. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from Harvard University, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, The Mellon Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Laurels Foundation. Her recent film, performance and multimedia work has been staged at the Harvard Film Studies Center, SEEDS Festival, Sonoma State University, WAXworks (NYC), BAX (NYC), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and in various collaborations and street performances in NYC and elsewhere. Her performance work is often collaborative and uses a combination of media (text, music, performance, and video). She has received degrees from Reed College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Harvard Divinity School and has taught literature, religion, media, and art at Coachman Family Homeless Shelter, Harvard University, Bayview Correctional Facility, Bard College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Hofstra University. Currently she is a poet on the faculty of the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College while also pursuing a doctoral degree in Comparative Religion at Harvard University. WEBSITE: kytheheller.com