Helen Heath
Helen explored how science poetry can reflect social upheaval, and contribute to epistemic cognition and scientific paradigm shifts.
PhD awarded 2017
Helen's debut collection of poetry Graft was published in 2012 by Te Herenga Waka University Press. In 2013 it won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry in the New Zealand Post Book Awards, and was the first book of fiction or poetry to be shortlisted for the Royal Society of NZ Science Book Prize. Her second collection is, Are Friends Electric? (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2018).
Her poetry and essays have been published in many journals in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the USA. She won the inaugural ScienceTeller Poetry Award in 2011 for her poem ‘Making Tea in the Universe’. Her chapbook of poems Watching for Smoke was published by Seraph Press in 2009; the same year she completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria. She has been known to blog sporadically. She is the Publishing programme leader at Whitireia Publishing.
Helen's research project explores how science is represented in the work of post-war, contemporary poets writing in the 80s and 90s.
Helen writes: 'The domestication of technology has helped scientific concepts, imagery and vocabulary become part of our daily lives. Few people can explain the workings of a smart phone or computer, but these technologies are increasingly part of our everyday lives. In fact I would go so far as to say that we are all cyborgs now, in that we have incorporated technology not only into our lives but into our bodies. From hip replacements and pacemakers to computers as prosthetics, even plastic surgery and spectacles – we augment ourselves and merge with technology. This merging of humans with technology is the direction I am taking the creative component of my dissertation. I am writing a collection of poetry. I intend to write lyric poems although I am aiming to find some new forms for my work, possibly, in some instances, digital.'