Heather Sullivan is an active member of Ocean State Poets, a group whose mission is to give voice to Rhode Islanders by conducting workshops in prisons, nursing and group homes, addiction recovery centers and alternative learning environments. Sullivan is the editor of two poetry chapbooks, Butterfly Wings and Poems on Branches, published by Salve Regina University, featuring the works of 75 individuals.

In 2007, Heather was appointed Assistant Creative Director of the Rhode Island Writers’ Circle, where she volunteered until 2010. In 2007, Sullivan served as a panel judge for Barnes and Noble’s State-wide Maya Angelou High School Poetry Contest.

Heather holds an M.A. in English and won First Place in Writers’ Digest’s 1999 Competition in memoir / personal essay category. Sullivan’s work has appeared in Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature; Balancing the Tides: A Newport Journal; The Writers’ Circle’s 2008 & 2010 Anthologies; Newport Round Table’s Walls and Bridges Anthology; The Providence Journal; Newport Life Magazine; The Newport Daily News and She Shines Magazine. Her essay Compassion aired on Rhode Island’s National Public Radio’s This I Believe series, and she has recorded her poetry for Insight Radio for the visually impaired.

2014 Update:  Heather's first chapbook, These Onyx Hours, is published by Finishing Line Press.

Origami Micro-Chapbook	Selected Poem(s)
Becoming
Dear Girl * Read by Heather Sullivan •	{mooblock=Dear Girl} I watch you trying to resurrect my African violet, as if you can hold on to me by watering those dead leaves.   Dear girl, listen to your Grandma: my spirit is no more in that plant than it is in the ground! I’m like the hummingbird now—   not the replica etched on my headstone or the figurine on your bookshelf, but the live gal with jade wings flecked black that hovered eye-level where you sat   that morning on a step, mourning my death and the death of your marriage.   Perfect timing, considering, a wise soul told you. Perfect timing indeed: See? You have my stuff to fill your place.   Just keep it simple. The last thing I baked on the cookie sheet: cookies. The last thing I made in the bread pan: bread.   So, when your mind spins backward, flit and sip nectar from bloom to bloom. Let go, dear girl. Let go and grow   something new. · Heather Sullivan © 2011 {/mooblock}
Leaves Fall
Landing * Read by Heather Sullivan •	{mooblock=Landing} Today, the wind blows leaves deliberately from just one tree: the yellow one in your backyard that is on fire with sunlight. You watch the leaves cascade in streams— Rapunzel’s spun-gold tresses spilling from her tower—   until one leaf stops mid-fall, as if gravity ceases to exist in the tiny space that leaf occupies. You are mesmerized as it twirls eye-level like an amber-winged fairy suspended by invisible thread. You know there is a scientific explanation for the leaf’s hesitation— it has been caught up in a cross-current—   but this, rather, is a crossroads, a threshold; you are on the brink of something, altering the place you would have settled, because this leaf reminds you of what eye contact feels like— the real kind: when your surroundings disappear and those eyes you’re peering into become new worlds.   All at once, the wind changes direction; it simply shifts, releasing its captive.   You watch as the leaf makes its graceful descent before landing on the terrain of a new season,   and you know, just as the leaf does, that this time the answer is in the letting go. •   Heather Sullivan © 2009 {/mooblock}
These Onyx Hours
Daylight Saving * Read by Heather Sullivan  •	{mooblock=Daylight Savings}       It is He who reveals the profound and hidden things.       He knows what is in the darkness, and the      light dwells with Him.  ~ Daniel 2:22 My father shoots his photos in the dark. The moon, his flashbulb, tacked to a backdrop of sky.  His camera lens: a telescope to penetrate these onyx hours. Later, Dad brings his findings home; like a poet, he exposes the ink sea. Slowly, he lifts layers of darkness from the snapshot’s surface. until the shadows emerge in color, until he discovers a purple blur beneath all that night: a lone iris lost in the reeds. Near dawn, my father pulls this flower from the shadows and names it Fragile Beauty. And I think that about sums it up— this once-hidden bloom, now here in sharp focus—one bright yellow tongue, one violet throat translating hope. I ponder my father’s process— how it would be easier to capture images by day, but there is something to his deliberate unveiling, his patient  uncovering, (with eyes drenched in wonder) that reveals his real nature. My father, ever the teacher, unfolds each of his children this way: through such gentle illumination, such quiet searching.  It is a good thing Dad’s pupils are coal-black, his irises, sepia: to filter the light of his blinding kindness. · Heather Sullivan © 2009 {/mooblock}

 * Recorded at Symposium Books, East Greenwich 11/17/2012

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