Heather Spears was a Canadian-born poet, novelist, artist, sculptor, and educator.
22 Facts About Heather Spears
1.
2.
Heather Spears resided in Denmark from 1962 until her death in Copenhagen in 2021.
3.
Heather Spears returned to Canada annually to conduct speaking and reading tours and to teach drawing and head-sculpting workshops.
4.
Heather Spears published eleven collections of poetry, five novels, and three volumes of drawings.
5.
Heather Spears specialized in drawing premature infants and "infants in crisis".
6.
Heather Spears was born in 1934 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
7.
Heather Spears received her formal training at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver and the University of British Columbia.
Related searches
Emily Carr 8.
Heather Spears learned Danish but continued to speak English at home.
9.
Heather Spears studied anatomical drawing at the Panum Institute and Arabic at the University of Copenhagen.
10.
Heather Spears published her first book of poetry, Asylum Poems and Others, in 1958.
11.
Heather Spears often combined poetry and art, as in her books Drawings from the Newborn, The Panum Poems, and Required Reading, which present both poems and line drawings, and Line by Line, which depicts drawings of Canadian poets along with sample poems.
12.
Heather Spears wrote a science fiction trilogy about conjoined twins, and a crime fiction novel.
13.
Heather Spears catered to the summer tourist trade by sketching individual and family portraits.
14.
Heather Spears became fascinated by premature infants, a subject she had not learned about in her anatomy classes, and produced many pencil and chalk drawings of preterm infants in the neonatal intensive care unit.
15.
Heather Spears studied infant muscle structure and began modeling babies' heads in clay.
16.
Heather Spears began accepting private commissions from parents to draw their stillborns and babies who had died after birth.
17.
Heather Spears was invited to serve as artist-in-residence at the Dalhousie University medical school in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1998.
18.
In spring 1989, during the First Intifada, Heather Spears spent six weeks in the Palestinian National Authority to draw children injured in the conflict.
19.
Heather Spears funded her trip with $1,000 in grants from the Canadian Council of Churches and a peace fund in Denmark.
20.
Heather Spears produced 300 pencil and chalk drawings of wounded children in hospitals, surgeries, refugee camps, West Bank villages, and military courts.
21.
Heather Spears held memberships in the League of Canadian Poets, Writers' Union of Canada, and SF Canada; the Society of Authors; and Tegnernes Forbund, the Danish Graphic Artist's Federation.
22.
In 2016, Heather Spears received a Naji Naaman Literary Prize.