About Heather Bourbeau
As a communications strategist and researcher with expertise in climate change, conflict, migration, humanitarian aid, and technology, Heather Bourbeau has worked with colleagues around the world to produce influential high-level reports and communications strategies.
She has developed strategic political analysis and reports for high-level UN officials and overseen multinational teams in complex and sensitive political environments. She has transferred her research and functional skills into effective and compelling design research and communications strategy projects with various UN agencies, as well as hardware start-ups and established technology companies.
Heather Bourbeau’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. She has been featured on KALW and the San Francisco Public Library’s Poem of the Day, and her writings are part of the Special Collections at the James Joyce Library, University College Dublin. Her collection Some Days The Bird is a poetry conversation with the Irish-Australian poet Anne Casey (Beltway Editions, 2022). Her latest collection Monarch is a poetic memoir of overlooked histories from the US West she was raised in (Cornerstone Press, 2023).
Honors & Awards
- Some Days The Bird awarded NYC Big Book Awards Distinguished Favorite
- Winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s Inaugural Contest
- Chapman University Flash Fiction First Place Winner for “Vichy”
- Nominated for Pushcart Prize for “The Birdmen of Istanbul” and “Hopscotch”
- Short story “Albania, 1985” included in Wigleaf’s Longlist for 2017
- Finalist for the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition
- Finalist for the Rita Dove Award in Poetry
- Semi-finalist for Disquiet International Literary Prize
- Semi-finalist for the Discovery Poetry Contest from the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center
- Semi-finalist in the American Short(er) Fiction Contest.
- Semi-finalist for Chestnut Review’s Stubborn Artists Contest
- Runner-Up in LA Review Literary Award for Short Fiction
- Member of the National Writing Project’s Writers Council