Lecturer Heather June Gibbons Discusses Voice and Visibility in Poetry

CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS -- Heather June Gibbons is the author of the poetry collection “Her Mouth as Souvenir,” winner of the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize (University of Utah Press), and two chapbooks, “Sore Songs” (Dancing Girl Press), and “Flyover” (Q Avenue Press). A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has been the recipient of a Full Fellowship Residency from the Vermont Studio Center, the Pavel Strut Poetry Fellowship from the Prague Summer Program and the Harold Taylor Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She lives in San Francisco and teaches Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, the Writing Salon and as a Teaching Artist for Performing Arts Workshop, a youth arts education nonprofit. “Write about what you don’t know and what you don’t understand. Write about what confounds you,” Gibbons says. “Surprise yourself. Approach the writing of a poem as a process of discovering what you think and feel as you write.”