Heather McHugh

Heather McHugh (born August 20, 1948) is an American poet.

She is notable for Dangers, To the Quick and Eyeshot. McHugh was awarded the MacArthur Fellows Program and Griffin Poetry Prize.

McHugh was born in San Diego, California on August 20, 1948, to Canadian parents.

Her parents raised McHugh in Gloucester Point, Virginia.

There, her father directed the marine biological laboratory on the York River.

She began writing poetry at age five and claims to have become an expert eavesdropper by the age of twelve.

At the age of 17, she entered Harvard University.

One of her most notable works, Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968–1993, won the Bingham Poetry Prize of the Boston Book Review and the Pollack-Harvard Review Prize.

It was also named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review.

Another, "Glottal Stop: Poems by Paul Celan" co-authored with Nikolai B. Popov, won the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

She arrived in Cambridge at age 17 and graduated with honors, receiving her B.A. from Harvard in 1970.

She was a Fellow at Cummington Community for the Arts in 1970, and entered graduate school at the University of Denver in 1971, having already published a poem in The New Yorker.

She began teaching there, and received an Academy of American Poets prize in 1972.

After earning her M.A. in 1972, McHugh received MacDowell Colony fellowships in 1973, 1974, and 1976.

In 1974, she also received her first of three National Endowment for the Arts grants in poetry.

McHugh was the poet-in-residence at Stephens College in Missouri between 1974 and 1976; she worked as an associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton between 1976 and 1982.

At 29, she completed a manuscript of poems titled Dangers (1976), that was a winner of Houghton Mifflin Co.'s New Poetry Series Competition, and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1977.

After a Yaddo Colony fellowship in 1980, her second book, titled A World of Difference: Poems (1981), was published by Houghton Mifflin.

McHugh was 33.

During this time, she was a visiting professor at Warren Wilson College in the M.F.A. Program for Writers in North Carolina; at Columbia University in New York between 1980 and 1981; and at the University of California, Irvine in 1982.

During the 1980s, McHugh worked a great deal on translation, partly due to her alliance with her co-translator and husband at that time, who also taught at the University of Washington.

Her translation work includes well-known international poets like Follain and Rilke, as well as Romanian Jewish poet of the Holocaust Paul Antschel, who wrote under the pseudonym Paul Celan.

This latter translation, entitled Glottal Stop: Poems by Paul Celan, would win the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

Her poetry translation of Jean Follain's French work is titled D'après tout: Poems by Jean Follain (1981) and was published by Princeton University Press in the Lockhart Poetry in Translation series.

In 1984, she became the Milliman Writer-In-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle.

During 1987, she was the Holloway Lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley.

While the top journals published her poetry, some poems were also anthologized in prestigious collections, and top critics called her observations astute and noteworthy as well as courageous.

That same year World of Difference came out, her first book of translations was published.

McHugh was elected as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999.

She taught for some 40 years at American colleges and universities, including the University of Washington in Seattle, and still takes some students through the low-residency Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

In 2009, she was awarded the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" for her work.

Then in 2011–2012, she started the nonprofit CAREGIFTED to provide respite and tribute to long-term caregivers of the severely disabled and chronically ill.

For her work there, she received notice from Encore.org's Purpose Prizes.

McHugh has published eight books of poetry, one collection of critical essays, and four books of translation.

She has received numerous awards and critical recognition in all of these areas, including several Pushcart Prizes, the Griffin Prize in poetry, and many others.

Her poems resist contemporary identity politics.

She also rejects categorization as a confessional poet, although she studied with Robert Lowell during the time when that described his work.

Her primary education included parochial school, where she credits a nun's emphasis on grammar as an early influence.

When McHugh was a student at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia, a teacher advised McHugh against applying to Radcliffe, making her determined to get in.

The residency was initiated that same year, and McHugh filled the position until 2011 when she was appointed Pollock Professor of Creative Writing.