Heidi Lynn Nilsson is a writer based in Watkinsville, Georgia
Heidi Lynn Nilsson
If you number your days,
your life will change—
you’ll try to arrange
some thunder.
Better to learn to feel
what the half-moon feels—
better to have grown
fully present
and half-known.
“I have had only a handful of first encounters with what I recognized immediately to be an original vision, an authentically new, striking, and gifted voice. One such encounter was with the work of Heidi Lynn Nilsson. Hers is a voice worth hearing—one that doesn’t need to shout in order to prove itself.”
—Carl Phillips, American Poets
Published Work
Nilsson’s second collection, For the Fire from the Straw, is out on Barrow Street Press, and her first collection, The Math of Gifts, won The Singer-Sargent Award and was published by Slapering Hol Press.
Her work has been published in Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Pleiades, American Poets, and The Academy of American Poets’ New Voices anthology.
She is currently finishing a novel set in France during the Bell Époque.
“Heidi Lynn Nilsson's For the Fire from the Straw is a dark and strange extension, to paraphrase Tielhard de Chardin, of a spiritual being having a human experience…though she sometimes conjures an echo of Dickinson, or her own Viking ruthlessness, Nilsson uses poetry for what poetry is for: the unexplained language that explains.”
—Sean Singer, Today in the Taxi / Honey & Smoke