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 Thirsting for Lemonade, is scheduled to be launched in 2011. She has three unpublished novels and is eagerly awaiting that perfect publisher who just ‘gets her’. Alongside other awards and commendations, in 2005, her novel manuscript And the Word was Song was longlisted for the Australian / Vogel Award, and in 2007 she won a Varuna mentorship for her manuscript Monsoon Blooming.

She is Poetry Editor for Wet Ink, book reviewer for various publications, including Cordite Poetry Review, spoken word advocate and a sometimes tutor in Media at the University of Adelaide. Busily fulfilled with being a wife and partner to Dash and mother to two small boys and a very small girl – 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.