Heather Clark is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize. Red Comet also won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography, and was a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2021. This title is the starting point for this conversation, part of an international conference dedicated to ‘the art of biography’.

Clark is also the author of two award-winning monographs, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath e Ted Hughes and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast, 1962-1972, and a forthcoming novel, The Scrapbook. She is currently working on a group biography of mid-century women poets in Boston, and a biography of Anne Sexton.