Heather Altfeld

Biography

Heather Altfeld is a poet and essayist. She has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University in New York with majors in both Anthropology and Creative Writing, and an MFA in Poetry from the California State MFA consortium. Her two books of poetry are Post-Mortem (Orison Books, 2021) and The Disappearing Theatre (Poets at Work, 2016). Her work is featured in the 2019 Best American Essays, Orion Magazine, Aeon Magazine, Narrative Magazine, and others. She was the 2017 recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award with the Poetry Society of America and the 2015 recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She teaches in the Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities and the Honors Program at CSU Chico.

Published Works

Post-Mortem (Orison Books, 2021)
The Disappearing Theatre (Poets At Work Press, 2016)

Links to Sample Works

Poetry

• Electric Lit, “Sinkhole” and “The Drowning”
• The Cortland Review, “Late Atonement, Lower Sierra”

Essays

• Literary Hub “Obituary for Dead Languages”
• Literary Hub “The Magical Substratum”  
• Narrative Magazine, “Adolescence”

Languages of Publication(s) and Poets Translated

Greek (Lena Kallergi)

Subject Matter

Antisemitism, Art & Ekphrasis, Childhood, Cultural Identity, Death, Eastern Europe, Environment & Climate Crisis, Family, Grief & Elegy, Intergenerational Trauma, Jewish Mysticism, Jewishness, Loss, Mythology, Narrative, Nature, Shoah, Genocide, Torah, Yiddish Language & Yidishkayt, Feminism, Documentary Poetics, Translation.