Heather Sellers
Professor
CONTACT
Office: CPR 303
Phone: 813-974-9532
Fax: 813-974-2270
Email
BIO
Heather Sellers, born and raised in Florida, has been teaching at the college level for thirty-four years and is the author of eleven books, most recently How to Make Poems: Form and Technique. Her memoir You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know: a true story of family, face-blindness, and forgiveness (Riverhead), was an O, Oprah book-of-the-month club selection and New York Times Editor’s Choice also featured on Good Morning America, Rachel Ray, NPR's All Things Considered, and Dick Gordon’s The Story. Her essays appear in Tin House, Parade, Reader’s Digest, The Sun, Good Housekeeping, O Magazine, The London Daily Telegraph, Brevity, The New York Times, The Best American Essays, The Pushcart Prize LXII, and the Royal Academy Journal of Medicine.
Sellers is the author of five volumes of poetry: Your Whole Life, Drinking Girls and Their Dresses, The Boys I Borrow, The Present State of the Garden, and Field Notes from the Flood Zone, winner of a State of Florida book award. Recent poems appear in Prairie Schooner, Conduit, The Bennington Review, The North American Review, Field, The Bellingham Review, Agni, Gulf Coast Review, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, New Letters, and The Sun.
In 2001, Sellers published Georgia Under Water (Sarabande Books) a collection of linked short stories that won a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers award. She’s written a children’s book, Spike and Cubby’s Ice Cream Island Adventure (Henry Holt), two books on craft, Page after Page and Chapter after Chapter (Writer’s Digest), and a popular textbook for the multi-genre creative writing classroom, The Practice of Creative Writing (Bedford St. Martin’s Macmillan), now out in its fourth edition. The new edition is specifically designed for use in face-to-face and online classrooms, and features hybrid, flash, and experimental writing alongside fundamental training in each of the traditional genres.
Sellers has taught creative writing at Florida State University, the University of Texas, San Antonio, and St. Lawrence University. She has offered creativity workshops at Kripalu, a yoga center in the Berkshires, and at Esalen in California. She won a university teaching award at the University of South Florida for undergraduate teaching success in 2017 and she won the USF Kosove Award for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence and Service in 2022.
In the undergraduate creative writing program and in the MFA program at USF, she teaches poetry, micro memoir, middle grade novels, and the essay. “As thesis director, I’m committed to helping writers devise a substantive project that is both publishable and do-able. I support writers in getting started early and developing a meaningful daily practice. We spend a lot of time planning the arc of the book, considering process, and working out a successful structure.”
Education
PhD, Florida State University, Creative Writing.
AREA OF SPECIALTY
Creative writing: non-fiction, micro memoir, poetry, poetry of mindfulness. Creative writing pedagogy: multi-genre classroom, teacher training, creative writing and AI.