Dr. Heather Clark is an American writer, literary critic and academic.
Her biography of poet Sylvia Plath, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize.
Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars fellowship, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York.
She is also the author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (2011) and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972 (2006).
Her debut novel The Scrapbook will be published on 7 June 2025.
Heather Clark is currently working on a biography on Anne Sexton as well as on a group biography about the Boston years of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich and Maxine Kumin.



