Writers and Books recognizes SUNY Brockport
Professor Emeritus William Heyen

William Heyen, professor of English and poet-in-residence emeritus at SUNY Brockport, has been selected as the 2003 Writers & Books Award Winner as the "Individual Who Has Made Life-long Contributions to the Rochester Literary Community." Heyen will be honored at an awards ceremony and reception at the Rochester Academy of Medicine, 1441 East Avenue, on November 21.

Heyen, a former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany, has won National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim, American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters, and other prizes and fellowships. He is the author of more than 20 books including Long Island Light, Erika: Poems of the Holocaust, Ribbons: The Gulf War, The Host: Selected Poems, and Crazy Horse in Stillness, winner of the 1997 Small Press Book Award. He recently edited September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, and his writing has also appeared in 200 anthologies and in such magazines as "Harper's," "The New Yorker," "Poetry," "American Poetry Review," and others. Collections of his manuscripts are held at Boston University, Yale University, Ohio University and the University of Rochester.

He was a member of the SUNY Brockport Department of English faculty from 1967 until his retirement in 2000.

Two new books of poems have just appeared - Shoah Train, a volume of Holocaust poems 12 years in the making, and The Rope, a volume of nature poems, which also took shape over more than a decade. Before the end of this year, a book of 42 short store is, The Hummingbird Corporation, will appear.

Next year, he will publish two collections of essays and his first book of poems, Depth of Field (1970), will be reissued in the Classic Contemporaries series from Carnage-Mellon University Press.