Heather McHugh

1948 –
Read poems by this poet

Born on August 20, 1948, to Canadian parents in San Diego, California, Heather McHugh was raised in Gloucester Point, Virginia. Her father was a marine biologist, and directed the marine biological laboratory on the York River. She entered Harvard University at the age of seventeen.

McHugh’s first collection of poems, Dangers: Poems, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1977. Since then, she has published numerous acclaimed collections, including Muddy Matterhorn (Copper Canyon Press, 2020); Upgraded to Serious (Copper Canyon Press, 2009); Eyeshot (Wesleyan University Press, 2004), which was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize; The Father of Predicaments (Wesleyan University Press, 1999); Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968–1993 (Wesleyan University Press, 1994), a finalist for the National Book Award and named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review; Shades (Wesleyan University Press, 1988); To the Quick (Wesleyan University Press, 1987); and A World of Difference (Houghton Mifflin, 1981).

McHugh is also the author of a collection of literary essays titled Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Wesleyan University Press, 1993), and three books of translation: Glottal Stop: Poems of Paul Celan, co-translated with Nikolai Popov (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize; Because the Sea Is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova, co-translated with Niko Boris (Wesleyan University Press, 1989); and D’après tout: Poems by Jean Follain (Princeton University Press, 1981).

With Ellen Bryant Voigt, McHugh coedited the anthology Hammer and Blaze: A Gathering of Contemporary American Poets (University of Georgia Press, 2002). McHugh also edited the anthology New Voices: University and College Prizes (Academy of American Poets, 1999), and served as the 2007 guest editor for the Best American Poetry series.

In a 1999 interview, McHugh said,

If you’re a poet smitten with English, you love it for its drive and not its drone. The rhythms of a language must be irresistible—while the humdrums of it have to be resisted. No linguistic habit is, per se, of interest—but ah! when the unsung (underlying) nun informs it—with a sensual twist or quick shape-shift! Well, that’s the trick: the sudden unexpectedness inside the over-known.

McHugh’s honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2006, one of the first United States Artists Awards. From 1999 to 2006, McHugh served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2000 was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2009, she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship for her work.

For more than twenty years, McHugh served as a visiting faculty member in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. She was, since 1984, the Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington, where she is currently a professor emerita.