Heather Treseler is Professor of English and Presidential Fellow for Art and Education at Worcester State University. A poet, critic, and essayist, she teaches courses in poetry and non-fiction writing, contemporary American literature, and literature and medicine, and serves as the university liaison to the Worcester Art Museum. Prior to joining the Worcester State faculty, she earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University.
Treseler is the author of Auguries & Divinations, which received the 2023 May Sarton NH Poetry Prize and the 2024 Shelia Margaret Motton Book Award; it was reviewed in the Boston Globe, LitHub, On the Seawall, Worcester Magazine, and the Poetry Foundation. She is also the author of Parturition, which received the 2019 Munster Literature Centre’s international poetry chapbook award and the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her chapbook Hard Bargain is forthcoming with Lily Poetry in 2025.
Her poems appear in The American Scholar, The Irish Times, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Cincinnati Review, PN Review, and The Iowa Review, among other journals. In 2023, her poem “Postcript” received Narrative magazine’s 15th annual poetry award. Her poems have also received the W. B. Yeats Prize (2021) and The Missouri Review‘s Editors’ Prize (2019). In 2022, her poem “Chase Street” was selected by Warsan Shire as a finalist for The Moth Poetry Prize in Ireland.
Her essays appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, and in eight books about modernist and contemporary poetry. The latter includes chapters in Elizabeth Bishop in Context (Cambridge U. P.), Reading Elizabeth Bishop (Edinburgh U.P.), and the lead chapter in Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive (Lever Press). Her memoir essay “My Search for Elizabeth Bishop” was included in the list of “Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction” in Best American Essays 2022 and her essay on manuscript assembly appears in in Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, edited by Sarah Giragosian and Virginia Konchan.
In 2022, Treseler edited Beyond the Frame, Celebrating a Partnership in Public Education and the Arts, a collection of essays about signature works at the Worcester Art Museum by well-known New England writers and WSU faculty, which was reviewed in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and in The Boston Globe.
Recipient of the George I. Alden Award for Excellence in Teaching, Treseler has received fellowship support from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Maine Women Writers Collection, and the Boston Athenaeum. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center.
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