Eva Heisler is a Maryland-born poet and art critic/historian. Her poems have been widely published in journals, including BOMB, Crazyhorse, The Indiana Review, Poetry Northwest, and Tupelo Quarterly. She has published two books of poems: Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic (Kore Press) and Drawing Water (Noctuary Press). Honors include The Nation’s “Discovery” Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award, and a residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts. A Fulbright grant brought her to Iceland in 1997 where she lived for several years, researching Icelandic art with a focus on conceptual practices. Art historical publications include “Soulful Mathematics: Poetry and Icelandic Conceptualism,” an essay exploring the relevance of Icelandic literary traditions to the emergence of Icelandic Conceptualism, and the catalog essay for Katrin Sigurðardóttir’s installation at the 2013 Venice Biennale. She is the visual arts editor of Asymptote, a journal of world literature in translation.
While at MacDowell, she worked on the poetry project "Vocabulary Landscape," an exploration of the vocabularies—Icelandic, art historical, literary, political—of landscape traditions and environmental policies. She also drafted "Acres of Perhaps," a sequence focused on her struggles to reconcile the making of poetry with the construction of something called “art history.”
