Having been coached or mentored at key stages in her writing life, Heidi understands the enriching experience and significance of both. Her latest poetry collection, The Print Museum (Bloodaxe, 2016), won the 2016 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry and the Book by the Cover Award 2016. Her first, Electric Shadow (Bloodaxe, 2011), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry.
Her work has appeared in journals across the UK, America and Australia and she has been translated into Polish, German, and Turkish. In 2008 and 2009 she was Writer-in-Residence for the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre. From 2011 to 2014 she was Poet-in-Residence at the John Jarrold Printing Museum. She is the current Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of East Anglia.
Heidi studied poetry and prose at UEA. She qualified as a Writing Coach through the National Association of Writers in Education and the Arvon Foundation, and is a professional member of the Association of Coaching (AMAC), specialising in Writing Coaching.
Testimonials
I’ve been lucky enough to be mentored by Heidi for a year. At first I signed up because I really wanted to learn how to write better poetry, more truthful poetry, that felt like it came from my experience rather than just me with an intention to write. I also wanted to feel less blocked in other areas of creativity too, such as music.
Heidi is encouraging, supportive and honest. She gives very detailed, very careful feedback that leads me straight to the areas I need to work on and gives me ideas and tools I can use to help me get there. She is a very careful listener and tailors suggestions for exercises and work towards my ways of working. The sessions with Heidi are very practical, which I love, and she provides a great deal of sources and activities to stretch the work, see how it can be improved, and help me work with what’s on the page.
Heidi is very sensitive when reading material, I’ve found her very careful at looking at work that means alot to me due to the emotional content. She is extremely emotionally astute, and rigorous too in allowing for one’s own emotions and concerns to come through in the work and encouraging that to happen. I am now at a stage where I could submit some poems to publications and Heidi has encouraged me to do so. It means a great deal to be at this stage. I feel that having Heidi as a mentor has given my practice a shape and a direction and also given me tools to keep going and keep looking critically at work (both my own and other poets’). Working with Heidi has been a great pleasure and has been invaluable in that it’s opened up subjects, methods and a practice that I didn’t think I’d be able to find.
– Jenny Robottom