Heather Kirn Lanier is an essayist, memoirist, and poet. She's the author of Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach For America (University of Missouri, 2012), and two award-winning poetry chapbooks, Heart-Shaped Bed in Hiroshima (Standing Rock, 2015), and The Story You Tell Yourself (Kent State U, 2012), winner of the Wick Poetry Open Chapbook Competition. Her related TED talk, "'Good' and 'Bad' Are Incomplete Stories We Tell Ourselves," has been viewed over two million times. She has received a Rona Jaffe - Bread Loaf Scholarship, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a Vermont Creation Grant. Her work has been noted in The Best American Essays Series and The Pushcart AnthologySeries. She has published poems and essays in dozens of places, including Salon, The Sun, Vela Magazine, Utne Reader Online, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and Fourth Genre. She is now Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Rowan University.
