William Heath was born in Youngstown, OH. A graduate of Hiram College, with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Case Western Reserve, he taught American literature and creative writing at Kenyon, Transylvania, Vassar, and the University of Seville as the Fulbright professor of American literature. Since 1981, he taught at Mount Saint Mary’s University, where he edited The Monocacy Valley Review. He retired as a professor emeritus in 2007. The William Heath Award is given annually to honor a student writer. In 2008–9, he was the Sophia M. Libman Professor of Humanities at Hood College. In 2022, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Hiram.
He authored many award-winning prose books, including The Children Bob Moses Led (Milkweed Editions, 1995; paperback, 1997), which is about the civil rights movement in Mississippi, and Devil Dancer (Somondoco Press, 2013) a neo-noir crime novel. His work was nominated for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. His book reviews and essays on Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, William Styron, Thomas Berger, Robert Stone, and Frank Bergon, among others, appear in newspapers, scholarly journals, literary magazines, reviews, and anthologies.
He began publishing poetry in the sixties. His recent collections include Steel Valley Elegy (Kelsay Books, 2022), Going Places (Kelsay Books, 2023), Alms for Oblivion (Kelsay Books, 2024), and Inventing the Americas (Finishing Line Press, 2024). He and his wife, Roser Caminals-Heath—author of ten novels in Catalan—live in Maryland.
Website:
www.williamheathbooks.com
Paperback: 144 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (March 6, 2026)