735 Emerson Avenue
Salt Lake City, UT 84105

(801) 366-3334
harpy32@comcast.net

(Literary Arts)

Heidi Hart is a Salt Lake City native with a Master's in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Northern Lights, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Quarterly West,and an anthology due spring 2001 from the Black Rock Press. Since January 2000 she has directed a writing workshop at Promontory Correctional Facility in Bluffdale, Utah.

Heidi encourages her students to draw on their senses. Class activities may include choosing an abstract word like "fear" and brainstorming what it tastes, sounds, or smells like; touching a stone or a shell while blindfolded and then writing down every word that comes to mind; or writing a riddle that describes a favorite food without naming it. "Poetry helps us wake up to the world," Heidi says.

Heidi has students read aloud, to learn from other poets' work and to internalize the sounds of poetry. Students may explore two very different visions of incarceration by reading Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Immigrants in Our Own Land" and Rilke's "The Panther." Sometimes the students choose the subject: love, insomnia, politics, or animals, for example. Class assignments often come out of the reading, because imitation is one of the best teachers!

To make poetry as approachable an art form as ceramics or dance, Heidi introduces the tools of the poet's craft: word choice, rhyme, rhythm, metaphor, etc. For practice and fun, her students write list poems, blues lyrics, and persona poems. Exercises like these help beginning writers get started and help more experienced ones try something new.

At the end of a residency, Heidi's students put together an anthology of their work.

A sample of her work is provided below.

"Arthritis"

Grandma rarely writes and won't
let anyone photograph her outturned foot
or her fingers' jigsaw

angles that can wrest the lid off
any pillbox or fold in mine
as cool

as the milk that flew when at sixteen
she dances into the living-room
clanging the glass jugs

Heidi is available for short-term residencies, special projects and teacher in-services. She prefers to work with teens and adults in the Salt Lake City area and will be available after July 2001.

Technical Requirements: Access to computer equipment and a copier, in addition to a supply of paper and pencils, would be a great help.