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Nationally recognized as one of America's fine non-fiction writers, Emily Hiestand is
known for her keen eye, humor, and inventive style.
Her subjects include: identity, community and place; unsung heroes,
travels, infrastructure, and the riches of daily life.
"Stylistically
perfect," "Comic genius," "Wise and dazzling," are comments about the writing for which Hiestand has received many
literary awards, including The Whiting Writers Award, The Pushcart
Prize, the National Magazine Award, the National Poetry Series prize,
and The Nation /Discovery Award. |
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Widely anthologized, Hiestand's writing
has also appeared in periodicals such as The Atlantic
Monthly, The New Yorker,
The Nation, and Salon,
as well as literary journals including The Georgia
Review and Partisan Review.
Hiestand is an active photographer, whose images have appeared
in Orion, The
Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, and
Bostonia, among other publications.
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Emily has
published three books: Green the Witch Hazel Wood
(Graywolf, 1988), The Very Rich Hours: Travels to
Belize, the Everglades, the Orkney Islands, and Greece,
(Beacon, 1992), and Angela The Upside Down Girl,
and Other Domestic Travels (Beacon, 1998). |
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 Selecting Green the Witch Hazel Wood for the National Poetry Series Award,
poet Jorie Graham wrote:
"With her radical trust in description
as a guide to the moral life – and her extraordinary trust
in the processes of logic – [Hiestand] works reason...until
it explodes once again into the magic and mystery it truly is." |
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 Hiestand’s
next book, an acclaimed collection of travel essays, The
Very Rich Hours, was described by Robert Finch
as "The most exciting travel writing I have read in years,"
and named by the San Francisco Chronicle
as one of "the five best books of travel writing of the year."
A vivid and entertaining tale of adventures in Greece, the Everglades,
Belize and the Orkney Islands, The Very Rich Hours
takes the occasion of four journeys to explore questions of nature
and culture.
Of this book, reviewers said:
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Travel writing is a demanding
genre. At its best, it is an exquisite mix of the personal, the
philosophical and the factual – artfully propelled by vivid
description. That's not an easy balance to achieve. But Emily Hiestand
gets it just right in The Very Rich Hours.
— The Inquirer
If one must travel, one should do it with
the eyes of a child, the mind of an ecologist, the heart of a
pagan, and the words of a poet. Astonishingly, Emily Hiestand
has all of that.
— Kirkpatrick Sale, author, The Conquest
of Paradise
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 Most
recently, Hiestand has written Angela The Upside
Down Girl, a collection of true stories about
the places, people, memories, and affinities that make up that fluxing
place we call "home." Described by critics as "Rich,
revealing, and often hilarious," essays from Angela
have received major awards: “Hymn,” about the wisdom and
community of an urban black church received the National Magazine
Award; "Neon Effects" was selected for The Pushcart Prize,
and for The Pushcart Book of Essays, the best essays from twenty-five
years of the Pushcart Prize; "Zip A Dee Doo Dah" was chosen
for the Norton Book of Nature Writing,
the definitive collection of writing about nature in English. Admiring
the Angela essays, the New
York Times Book Review described them as a "pursuit
of truth... driven by irrepressible curiosity and a sense of adventure."
The Cambridge Chronicle described
the book as "written with the freshness and originality of
Joyce in Dublin." The Boston Sunday Globe
wrote:
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Many personal essayists today try to capture
our interest by being confessional but run the risk of revealing,
like clumsy strippers, what we'd really rather not see. Hiestand
has taken the more unusual risk of writing about the quotidian,
and produced a tour de force. Ouuuuwheeeee. What a good book this
is!
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Links
Hiestand's
books
(This link will bring you to
a list of Emily's books available from Amazon.com)
Real
Places
Hiestand focuses her eye on local infrastructure — bridges,
wastewater treatment facilities, fish processing plants, shipping
terminals — and proposes these "bastions of the utilitarian"
as terrific travel destinations.
Hymn
Hiestand's tribute to the wisdom and community of an urban black
church. Recipient of The National Magazine Award.
Angela
The Upside Down Girl
The title story from Hiestand's collection about identity and
place.
Profound
Lack of Ellis
Hiestand's salute to the legendary Ellis The Rim Man
Warm
Spell
Bostonia's flaneuse gauges the apprehension, joy, and botanical
confusion brought on by unseasonable winter weather. Essay and
photographs.
Water
Park
"Circulating on the banks of the river, breathing deeply,
letting myself be drawn from one blue-green fact to another, I
have often felt like Popeye (or was it Wimpy?) bouyant merely
on some scent from Olive Oyl's kitchen." Essay and photographs.
Promised
Landscape
As Boston's Big Dig nears completion, Hiestand looks forward to
a new and symbolic landscape. Essay and photographs.
For more information on Emily's publications, to read essays, and tour photo galleries, visit Words+Images.
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