William Heath

I believe that fiction should delight and instruct and engage the reader in the real world, not offer escapist fantasy. Authors should be judged on the quality of their descption, dialogue, drama, and ability to create characters unlike themselves, charcters of different ages, gender, race, region and so forth. It is the clash of values and points of view that creates meaning in fiction. In The Children Bob Moses Led I wrote about the civil rights movement in Mississippi; in Blacksnake's Path the clashing worlds of the Miami and settlers in the Old Northwest; in Devil Dancer, I bring the lush horsefarms as well as the lowest dives of Lexington, Kentucky, to life. In my next novel I will write another very different world, but always I strive to dramatize what being human means. Blacksnake's Path, by the way, is now available as an ebook and The Children Bob Moses Led was reissued in 2014 in a twentieth-anniversary edition by NewSouth Books. In 2015 I published a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest, and in 2017 the University of Mississippi Press published Conversations with Robert Stone, a collection of interviews.  My chapbook of autobiographical poems, Night Moves in Ohio (Finishing Line Press) was published in 2019.  A book of poems about growing up in Poland, Ohio, and suburb of Youngstown, as well as a variety of other poems on various topics, Steel Valley Elegy (Kelsay Books) was published in 2022; Going Places (Kelsay Books) was published in 2023; Alms for Oblivion (Kelsay Books) published in 2024; a chapbook, Inventing the Americas (Finishing Line Press) also published in 2024.  In all, he has published forty book reviews, twenty-five essays, and over 400 poems.