Richard A Heller

Richard Heller writes poetry and prose shaped by a life lived mostly outdoors—on horseback, skis, and foot across California's High Sierras, Alaska, Mexico, and the Highlands of Scotland. His poems carry the weight of that experience: the land, the animals, and the people who endure in hard and beautiful places.

Heller is also a bronze sculptor, and the two crafts feed each other. His sculptures range as widely as his poems, from a Holocaust survivor to a series of wolves; the work of an artist drawn to both the human and the wild.

For thirty-five years he worked as a farrier and blacksmith, and spent seven of his early years teaching troubled children to ride. Born in Los Angeles, he has built things his whole life, including his own home in the Hollywood Hills. He now lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest.