Heidi Lynn Nilsson is a poet and prose writer who loves to play in the space where faith meets doubt, where the body confronts the spirit, and where language strains against what it's asked to carry.

Nilsson’s poetry collection, For the Fire from the Straw (Barrow Street Press, 2017), has been compared to Hopkins and Dickinson by critics who recognize in it what one reviewer called "a remarkable blend of faith, intellect, and physicality." The poems pull objects, events, and conversations from domestic life into spiritual territory, where they wrestle until the language breaks into something more honest than certainty. Her first collection, The Math of Gifts, won The Singer-Sargent Award and was published by Slapering Hol Press.

Nilsson is currently completing two longer works of fiction that extend the questions her poetry raises into sustained narrative. Her novel, set in Belle Époque France, Saint Monet, explores the cost of devotion—to art, to another person, to the construction of self—through a story about vision, memory, and what we lose when faith fractures.Wasn’t Water, her adaptation of The Volsunga Saga, examines what it means to mother a child into a world made terrible by human power. Both novels are animated by what early reviewers identify as her "feminist subversion of religious convention." Her protagonists refuse to choose between the body and the spirit, between sensuality and the sacred, between the pleasures of this world and hunger for the next.

Nilsson has taught creative writing in colleges, high schools, homeless shelters, and community arts centers. She is currently teaching craft classes in poetry, fiction, and memoir at the Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation while working privately with several writers on independent projects.