Former U student Hayley Heaton thought graduate school at the New School in New York would be “really, really hard.”
However, when she found out she would be studying with David Lehman, renowned poet and editor of the Oxford Anthology of American Poetry, she changed her mind.
“David not only cares about his students, he deeply cares about good poetry,” Heaton said. “He provokes you to be a better writer.”
Heaton, who said she writes poetry because she cannot write a paragraph to save her life, took every opportunity to hone her writing while at the U.
“Every single time I read a poem in an English class, it helped me develop as a poet,” Heaton said.
In addition to moving ahead in her own work, Heaton’s advice to fellow writers at the U helped many of them develop their writing.
“Hayley was smart, and well-read enough to give critiques of other people’s work that were both sensitive of the writer’s intention, and academic,” said Katie Bateman, a former classmate of Heaton.
Heaton also surveyed pop-culture for RED magazine in Salt Lake City, where she worked as a critic in a wide range of genres from poetry and classic jazz, to graphic novels and rap.
“Ask Hayley to describe a movie that she doesn’t like and she’ll call it the Wizard of
Boring,” said Jamie Gadette, Listings Editor for Salt Lake City Weekly and former assistant editor for RED magazine, “I loved that.”
Heaton published her first chapbook, hubbub, during her senior year at the U, which she designed, typeset and bound with the help of her sister, Amber Heaton, who studies printmaking at the U.
The literary community celebrated hubbub at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, where Hayley Heaton and several local poets read from their work.
Hayley Heaton currently lives in Brooklyn and, reflecting on her first year writing and studying poetry in New York, she said,
“I’m working on a few things: firstly, finding a new apartment-which is nothing like writing a poem. In fact, it might be the anti-poem.”
Hayley Heaton is also working on her thesis, trying to compile an anthology of poets influenced by Mormonism, starting a literary journal called Albatross with a few other poets, and interning at Tin House Magazine.
She said of her future goals, “I just want to write one fantastic poem. I’d even settle for one fantastic line.”