William Heath

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Recipient of the Hiram Lifetime Achievement Award More Info

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Going Places

Going Places, set abroad, is the companion volume to Steel Valley Elegy. The first section is inspired by two years as a Fulbright professor at the University of Seville; the second draws on lengthy stays in Barcelona, birthplace of his wife Roser; the third features their travels in Europe; and the fourth tours the world, including some places the author has only visited vicariously. The extensive collection ranges from sophisticated European pleasures to the miseries suffered by people in remote countries. All the poems display memorable narratives enriched by telling details, a lucid sensibility that combines grim wit with thoughtful commentary; his craft is marked by a love of sonorous words, a knack for the poetic line, and a deft way of moving the poem down the page. Going Places is the mature work of a singular poet.
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The Poet and the Poem interview with William Heath

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Steel Valley Elegy

Steel Valley Elegy

Steel Valley Elegy includes poems from Night Moves in Ohio as well as many more: some depict the civil rights movement in the Deep South and civil disturbances in northern cities. Others present Heath’s wry and ironic look at life in these United States, and a final sequence evokes the world of nature while raising philosophical questions. Heath maintains that poetry is written in musical lines about things that matter. His love of language, wide range of interests, and uncanny eye for telling details are always on display. A meditative yet humorous sensibility, an unflinching appetite for reality, memorable eloquence—Steel Valley Elegy displays the distinctive skills of an accomplished poet.
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Conversations with Robert Stone

Conversations with Robert Stone

Stone’s reputation rests on his mastery of the craft of fiction. These interviews are replete with insights about the creative process as he responds with disarming honesty to probing questions about his major works. Stone also has fascinating things to say about his remarkable life—a schizophrenic mother, a stint in the navy, his involvement with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, and his presence at the creation of the counterculture. From the publication of A Hall of Mirrors until his death in 2015, Stone was a major figure in American literature.
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About

William HeathWilliam Heath has a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University. He has taught American literature and creative writing at Kenyon, Transylvania, Vassar, the University of Seville, and Mt. St. Mary's University, where The William Heath Award is given annually to the best student writer. He is the author of three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Literary Award; selected by Time online as one of the eleven best novels ever written on the African-American experience), Blacksnake’s Path, Devil Dancer; three books of poetry, The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, and Going Places; two chapbooks, Night Moves in Ohio and Leaving Seville; a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old NorthwestNorthwest (winner of two Spur Awards and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award); and a collection of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone. He has published some three hundred poems and twenty scholarly essays. In 2023 he received the Hiram College Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Winner of the 2016 Spur Award for Best Western Historical Nonfiction Novel

William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest

William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest

"The truth-is-stranger-than-fiction remarkable life of William Wells has found an ideal biographer in novelist-turned-historian William Heath. This deeply researched reconstruction of Wells’ side-shifting odyssey brilliantly illuminates the confusing choices and challenges that confronted Indians and pioneers as they struggled against one another and with themselves on the early American frontier."  
—Stephen Aron, author of How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay

Western Writers of America has declared William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest, the 2016 Best Western Historical Nonfiction and Best First Nonfiction Book by awarding William Heath with two Spur Awards. This award “honors writers for distinguished writing about the American West...Since 1953 the Spur Awards have been considered one of the most prestigious awards in American literature.” For more information on the award visit the Western Writers of America web site.
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Essays

Review of Rob Harper, Unsettling the West
Journal: Middle West Review
Volume: 7:1 (November 2020) Pages 192-95

The Technique of Terror
Conference: Contemporary American literature, Institute of Italian/American Studies in Rome
Date: November 2020

An Appetite for Reality
Conference: Honors Convocation, At Emmitsburg, Maryland
Date: April 2020

The Long Run Massacre and the History of Early Louisville
Lecture: presented at The Filson Historical Society, Louisville
Date: October 10, 2019

James Smith’s Account: Re-thinking the Significance of the Captivity Narrative
Date: May 26, 2019

The Real Thing: Authenticity in Frank Bergon’s Fiction
Date: October 2, 2018

Homage to Robert Stone
Date: June 12, 2018

Thomas Berger’s Comedy of One-upmanship
Date: April 17, 2018

American Democracy on Trial: The Election of Donald Trump—an Overview 
Date: June 8, 2017

Human, All Too Human: Thomas Berger’s Crazy in Berlin
Web: Journal of American Studies
Date: May 2, 2017

Ariadne in Kentucky: Erotic Power and Mythic Resonance in William Heath’s neo-noir novel Devil Dancer
Conference: International Academy of Law and Mental Health Conference, At Prague, Session: Women, Madness, and Creation
Date: July, 2017

Writing History and Historical Fiction
Symposium: The Power of Filmmaking and Political Storytelling, Catalonia’s National Day, Chevy Chase, Maryland
Date: September 11, 2016

“The forgotten art of gayety”: The Puritans and Merry Old England
Web: Hawthorne in Salem
Date: January 19, 2016

Hawthorne, Milton, Shakesapeare and the Art of Allegory
Date: November 21, 2015

“The Morgan Rhys Diary and the Treaty of Greenville”
Journal: Northwest Ohio History
Volume: 80, No. 2 (Spring 2013): 148-164

Reinhart in Love: Thomas Berger’s Comedy of One-upmanship
Journal: The Texas Review
Volume: 33:3-4 (Fall/Winter 2012) Pages 92-102

Merry Old England and Hawthorne’s “The May-Pole of Merry Mount”
Journal: Nathaniel Hawthorne Review
Volume: 33:1 (Spring 2011) Pages: 41-71

Re-evaluating “The Fort-Wayne Manuscript”: William Wells and the Manners and Customs of the Miami Nation
Journal: Indiana Magazine of History
Volume: 106:2 (January 2010) Pages: 158-188

“The Dream of Undying Fame: Hawthorne’s Fanshawe”
Conference: Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, at Bowdoin College
Date: June 2008

Thomas Morton: From Merry Old England to New England
Journal: Journal of American Studies
Volume: 41:01 (March 2007) Pages: 135-168

“This Little Light of Mine”: Remembering the Civil Rights Movement and the Sixties
Date: January 2007

The Power of Passion: Hawthorne’s Tales of Thwarted Desire
Journal: The Cortland Review
Issue: 3 (May 1998)

“The Irreverent Imagination: Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter”
Conference: American Studies Lecture Series
Date: September 1995

“Melville and Marquesan Eroticism”
Journal: The Massachusetts Review
Volume: (Spring 1987) Pages: 43-65

Twain Tears and Flapdoodle: Sentimentality in Huckleberry Finn
Journal: The South Carolina Review
Volume:  19: 1 (Fall 1986) Pages: 60-79

I, Stingo, The Problem of Egotism in Sophie’s Choice
Journal: The Southern review
Volume: 20:3 (Summer 1984) Pages: 528-545

“Primitive Survivals and Second Skins: John Hawkes’s Second Skin”
Date: April 1982

An Interview with William Gass
Journal: Hudson River Anthology
Volume: Vol. VIII (April 1979) Pages: 7-14

Melville’s Search for the Primitive
Journal: Dialectical Anthropology
Volume: 3:4 (January 1978) Pages: 315-330

Paranoias and Parabolas
Journal: Amanuensis
Volume: (Spring 1973) Pages: 38-41

Books

Autographed copies can be purchased and shipped for free directly from the author.
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Going Places cover   Night Moves in Ohio cover   Night Moves in Ohio cover   Night Moves in Ohio cover   Conversations with Robert Stone  
William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest   The Children Bob Moses Led   Devil Dancer   Blacksnake's Path: The True Adventures of William Wells   The Walking Man