Writing & Literary Practice
Poetry · Essays & Creative Nonfiction · Journalism · Editorial Leadership · Professional Writing
I am a poet, writer, editor, and teaching artist working across poetry, creative nonfiction, journalism, literary publishing, and interdisciplinary creative practice.
My literary work explores memory, place, identity, ecology, ancestry, lived experience, and the ways personal experience intersects with larger social, historical, and environmental forces. Across forms, I am interested in how language helps us attend more closely to experience, make meaning from what we inherit and encounter, and understand our relationship to place and one another.
My process often draws from image, research, memory, field notes, visual materials, travel, and reflective practice. Alongside my literary work, journalism, editorial leadership, and professional writing extend my interest in language as a tool for clarity, connection, public understanding, and meaningful communication.
Selected Publications & Writing
My poetry has appeared in Illya’s Honey, Emerge Literary Journal, The Rusty Nail, and other publications.
My journalism and feature writing has appeared in news media publications including the Pueblo Star Journal and World Journal, where I have written about community life, arts and culture, environmental stewardship, education, innovation, and civic and other social issues.
Poetry
Environmental Memory • Embodied Experience • Witness • Interior & Exterior Landscapes
My poetry explores environmental memory, embodied experience, ecological attention, ancestry, identity, and the spiritual dimensions of lived experience. It often moves between interior and exterior landscapes, drawing on image, memory, sensory detail, and lyric reflection to explore experience, relationship, and change.
I am drawn to poems that hold tension: between wilderness and domesticity, inheritance and self-making, grief and renewal, the visible world and the unseen. Increasingly, the work also considers witness and the ways personal experience intersects with larger social, historical, and ecological forces.
This work is part of a developing manuscript shaped by ecopoetics, environmental memory, ancestry, embodied experience, and the relationship between place, history, and identity.
Selected Writing
My essays and creative nonfiction move across literary criticism, book reviews, feature writing, art and craft, creativity and well-being, personal experience, and public life.
Some pieces are critical or analytical; others are reflective, journalistic, or practical. Across forms, I am interested in how writing can examine ideas, document experience, deepen attention, and offer useful ways of thinking about creativity, connection, health, art, and the lives we build.
Selected published and portfolio work is available through my Writing Portfolio. New essays, poems, reflections, and literary notes are published through my Substack.
Journalism, Features & Public Writing
My journalism and feature writing focuses on community-driven initiatives, rural life, environmental stewardship, arts and culture, education, innovation, and public life.
Through work for publications such as the Pueblo Star Journal and World Journal, I have written about the people, places, projects, and ideas shaping Southern Colorado and beyond.
This writing reflects my interest in how narrative strengthens civic imagination, cultural connection, and community understanding. Public writing, for me, is a way of documenting lived places, honoring local knowledge, and helping communities see their own stories with greater depth and complexity.
Editorial Leadership
I serve as Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Red River Review, one of the early online literary journals, originally founded in 1999.
Under my leadership, Red River Review is being relaunched and expanded as a literary arts journal publishing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, hybrid work, visual art, and writing on creative practice. The journal’s renewed vision includes publication, archival preservation, contributor development, craft conversation, workshops, and community-building for writers and artists.
My editorial work includes shaping the journal’s vision, curating literary and visual work, developing calls for submissions, supporting contributors, leading publication strategy, stewarding the archive, and building a thoughtful creative ecosystem around the journal.
This work reflects my commitment to literary culture, creative exchange, and the role of publishing as a space for reflection, connection, and artistic development.
Professional Writing & Editing
Alongside my literary and editorial work, I provide professional writing and editing for mission-driven organizations, creative entrepreneurs, and leaders. My work includes strategic and organizational writing, grant and funding narratives, reports, website and public-facing content, curriculum and program materials, impact storytelling, and developmental and structural editing.
Explore More Writing
Read selected essays, articles, and creative nonfiction in my Writing Portfolio.
For new essays, poems, reflections, and literary notes, subscribe to Field Notes from Heather Robinson Hernandez on Substack.
