Spring 2025, on sabbatical leave
Heather Treseler is Professor of English and Presidential Fellow for Art and Education at Worcester State University. A poet, literary critic, and essayist, she teaches courses in poetry, non-fiction writing, and American literature, and serves as the university liaison to the Worcester Art Museum. Prior to joining the Worcester State faculty, she earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University.
She teaches the poetry workshop (beginning and advanced), American Literature I & II, Contemporary Poetry (since 1945), American Women Writers, and the special topics courses Contemporary Irish Poetry, Massachusetts Memoirs, and American Autobiographies.
Treseler is the author of the poetry collection Auguries & Divinations, which received the May Sarton Poetry Prize and the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Award. Reviews of Auguries & Divinations appeared in the Boston Globe, LitHub, On the Seawall, Worcester Magazine, and the Poetry Foundation. She is also the author of Hard Bargain, a chapbook of poems featured in New England Literary News, and Parturition, which received the Munster Literature Centre’s international poetry chapbook award in Ireland and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.
Her poems have received a Pushcart Prize, Narrative Magazine‘s 15th annual poetry prize, the W. B. Yeats Prize, The Missouri Review‘s Editors’ Prize (2019), and Frontier Poetry‘s prize. Her poems appear in The American Scholar, The Irish Times, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Cincinnati Review, PN Review, and The Iowa Review, among other journals.
Treseler’s criticism appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Plume, On the Seawall, PN Review, and in eight books about modernist and contemporary poetry including the essay “Elizabeth Bishop in New England” in Elizabeth Bishop in Context (Cambridge University Press) and the lead chapter in Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive (Lever Press). Some recent essays include:
Of Quirks and Quarks: John Koethe’s Cemeteries and Galaxies (Los Angeles Review of Books)
On Vidyan Ravinthiran’s Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir (On the Seawall)
On Virginia Konchan’s Requiem (Plume)
World Enough and Time: On Willard Spiegelman’s Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Art of Amy Clampitt (North American Review)
On Callie Siskel’s Two Minds (Harvard Review)
Her memoir essays appear in The Iowa Review, The Worcester Review, and Notre Dame Magazine, among other journals; her essay “My Search for Elizabeth Bishop” was included in the list of “Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction” in Best American Essays 2022 and her craft essay on manuscript assembly appears in in Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems.
In 2022, Treseler edited Beyond the Frame, Celebrating a Partnership in Public Education and the Arts, a collection of essays about signature works at the Worcester Art Museum by well-known New England writers and WSU faculty, reviewed in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and in The Boston Globe.
Recipient of the George I. Alden Award for Excellence in Teaching, Treseler has received fellowship support from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Maine Women Writers Collection, and the Boston Athenaeum. Since 2017, she has been a scholar at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center.