Heather McClelland earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been nominated for Pushcarts and Best of the Net and appears in Press 53’s journal Prime Number Magazine (2021 runner-up annual award for poetry), Waterwheel Review, and Willow Review, among others. Heather writes poems on demand with the Chicago-based typewriter collective Poems While You Wait, which requires writing six or more poems in two hours with no delete key. Heather’s manuscript One More Hour gathers prose and poetry prompted by phrases from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein in conversation with news texts, and are loosely based on intimate moments with family, strangers, and gardens in her suburban back yard. Her interest in erasures led to her current collaboration with an original edition of the 1959 anthology This Is Nature: Thirty Years of the Best from Nature Magazine. Her novel-in-progress, set in Chicago and the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, tells the story of three women who struggle with grief and the desire for revenge after the director of a small town’s experimental music festival is found murdered. Heather teaches creative writing, rhetoric, and literature at College of Lake County (Grayslake, IL) and served two years on the board of the Stories Matter Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the programming of Story Studio Chicago, Chicago Review of Books, and the Chicago Stories Project.
Manuscript Conferences
July 4, 2025
