Heather Sellers

Heather Sellers is an American memoirist, poet, fiction writer, and writing teacher whose two Writer's Digest titles, Page After Page and Chapter After Chapter, are widely used by working writers as motivational and disciplinary companions for the long slog of finishing a book. She holds a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University and teaches creative nonfiction at the University of South Florida, after a long earlier tenure at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

Page After Page: Discover the Confidence and Passion You Need to Start Writing and Keep Writing (2005) and Chapter After Chapter: Discover the Dedication and Focus You Need to Write the Book of Your Dreams (2007) frame the writing life as a daily practice that has to be built and protected rather than waited for. Both books draw on more than twenty years of teaching and her own writing life to give writers the rituals, habits, and mental approach that keep a manuscript moving across months and years. Her textbook The Practice of Creative Writing is used in undergraduate creative writing programs across the country.

Her memoir You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know: A True Story of Family, Face Blindness, and Forgiveness (Riverhead, 2010) covers her childhood in a chaotic Florida household and her adult realization that her trouble recognizing people was the neurological condition prosopagnosia, or face blindness. The book was an O, The Oprah Magazine book of the month club selection and is taught in creative nonfiction and memoir programs.

Sellers has also written the short story collection Georgia Under Water, which was part of the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program, three poetry collections, and the children's book Spike and Cubby's Ice Cream Island Adventure. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for fiction.