Heather Taylor Johnson was born in Minnesota in 1974 and spent the next twenty-five years moving around the USA.

She came to Adelaide in 1999 to attend the University of Adelaide, where she eventually received her PhD in Creative Writing. Focusing on themes of displacement and belonging, which often highlight motherhood and family, her poetry and short fiction have been published widely in Australia and occasionally overseas.

Her first book of poetry, Exit Wounds, was published by Picaro Press in 2007, and a forthcoming collection entitled Letters to my Lover from a Small Mountain Town is scheduled to be launched early 2012 by Interactive Press. Alongside other awards and commendations, in 2005, her novel manuscript And the Word was Song was longlisted for the Australian / Vogel Award, in 2007 she won a Varuna mentorship for her manuscript Monsoon Blooming, and in 2011 she returned to the Blue Mountains for the HarperCollins Varuna award for her novel manuscript Pursuing Love and Death. She is eagerly awaiting that perfect publisher who just ‘gets her’.

She is Poetry Editor for Wet Ink, book reviewer for various publications, including Cordite Poetry Review and Mascara Literary Review, spoken word advocate and a parttime tutor in Creative Writing at Flinders University. Busily fulfilled with being a wife and partner to Dash and mother to Guthrow, Sunny, and Matilda, she is becoming a master of sneaking in a minute here and a minute there of writing time. She has a dog named Tom, 700 skydives under her belt, can speak Spanish better than the average two year old Spaniard and cooks enormous pots of black beans with homebrewed stout beer.