Baker Artist Portfolios

Heather Rounds received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Baltimore in 2007. After graduating she took a teaching job in Kurdistan, Iraq and while there briefly did some journalism for a local, English-language newspaper. Her experiences with the paper served as the inspiration for her debut novel, There, which won Emergency Press’ 2011 International book award and was published by the Press in 2013. Though she started her publishing career as a poet, over the years she’s moved into hybrid forms of fiction and nonfiction. And while most interested in prose at this point, Rounds maintains an allegiance to the lyrical and visual, placing high value on the way words sound and look on the page, as well as the white space that surrounds them. She is inspired by place, history, culture, and social strata and is interested in utilizing written forms as a means of exploring the ephemeral and how living beings engage and fail to engage with each other. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous publications, including PANK, The Baltimore Review, Poet Lore, Big Lucks, Smokelong Quarterly, Bayou Magazine and Atticus Review. She is also the author of She Named Him Michael (a novella, Ink Press, 2017), Light There is to Find, (a novel, Adelaide Books, 2018) and Some History of Our Animals (short stories, Cyberwit, 2020). A part of the Baltimore arts community since the early 2000s, she has curated and participated in numerous exhibitions and readings of all shapes and sizes. Rounds serves as Acquisition Editor for Mason Jar Press and serves on the Board of Directors for Passager Books--two independent, Baltimore based publishers. She is a contributing writer and editor for Iraq’s United Nations Industry Development Organization Programs (UNIDO). In 2023 she was a finalist for the Baker Artist Awards (Literary Arts) and the Granum Foundation Prize and received a Pushcart Nomination.