Poet and Memoirist Heather Treseler Shares Writing Advice with Westwood High Creative Writing Students

As part of Westwood Poet Laureate Lynne Viti's  Poets in the Schools project, award winning poet Heather Treseler visited teacher Kieran  Moriarty's  Creative Writing class on April 7, presenting a writing workshop  for student authors of  poetry and fiction. Treseler shared her approach to journaling, revision and editing,  using handouts to demonstrate  successive versions of  poems in her collection, Auguries and Divinations (Bauhan Publishing, 2023), winner of the 2023 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Students had the opportunity to discuss Treseler's process with her and raise questions about how to best deploy her strategies in their own writing.

The workshop concluded with Treseler's  describing the inspiration for  three of her poems-- "Pupura" "Louisiana Requiem" and "Factories at Clichy" --and reading the poems aloud for the class. Mr. Moriarty summed up the value of this workshop  as well as of the Creative Writing course at WHS in this way: "I hope our Creative Writing classes here help every student as they develop their own writing voice, allowing them to more fully illustrate what it's like for them in their historical moment. "

Heather Treseler is Professor of English and Presidential Fellow for Art and Education at Worcester State University. A poet, critic, and essayist, she teaches courses in poetry, non-fiction writing, and American literature, and serves as the university liaison to the Worcester Art Museum. She is also the author of the chapbooks Hard Bargain (2025) and Parturition (2020); the latter received the 2019 chapbook award from the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Plume, PN Review, The Irish Times, JAMA, Narrative, The Missouri Review, Cincinnati Review, and The Iowa Review, among other journals.

Funding for this event was provided by Lynne Viti's 2025 grant from the Westwood and Massachusetts Cultural Councils.