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Heather Sellers Named to St. Lawrence University
Visiting Professorship for Spring Semester

Posted November 12, 2001

HOLLAND -- Dr. Heather Sellers of the Hope College English faculty has been appointed to a prestigious visiting professorship at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., for the spring semester.

The university's Creative Writing Program has announced that Sellers has been selected to be the Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing for the spring of 2002. She is currently on a year-long sabbatical leave from Hope, where she is an associate professor of English.

The Viebranz professorship was created by friends of Salfred C. Viebranz, an SLU trustee emeritus and graduate. The donors stipulate that "the intended end product of the endowment is to attract visiting writers capable of inspiring students of already recognized talent to rise to a new level of proficiency."

Sellers will spend the spring semester in residence at St. Lawrence. She will give a public reading from her work on Thursday, Feb. 7, in the SLU Writers Series. She will also teach two fiction writing courses, one at the introductory level and one for advanced students. In addition to participating in English Department activities, she will have time to continue working on her own writing.

Sellers has been a member of the Hope faculty since 1995. She earned her bachelor's, master's and doctorate at Florida State University, in 1985, 1988 and 1992 respectively. Her stories and poems have been published in many journals and magazines, including "New Stories from the South," "Five Points," "Alaska Quarterly Review" and "Sonora Review," and have received numerous awards and honors. She was one of only 30 writers nationally to receive a National Endowment for the Arts grant for 2000-02.

Her book "Georgia Under Water," a collection of linked short stories published in 2001 by Sarabande Books of Louisville, Ky., has been chosen for the Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" program. She is also author of a children's story "Spike and Cubby's Ice Cream Island Adventure," to be published later this year by Henry Holt.

During her current 2001-02 sabbatical leave, Sellers is working on a novel, "The Plain and Simple Truth," a sequel to "Georgia Under Water." Work on the novel has been assisted by a residency awarded to her this fall by the Ragdale Foundation, an internationally acclaimed artists' community located in Lake Forest, Ill.

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