Heather Lanier: Raising a Rare Girl

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Heather Lanier will be in conversation with Stephen Kuusisto.

Award-winning writer Heather Lanier’s memoir about raising a child with a rare syndrome, defying the tyranny of normal, and embracing parenthood as a spiritual practice that breaks us open in the best of ways.

“Lanier’s memoir is now on the short list of books I’ll give, when the time comes, to my own pregnant daughters. Lanier shines a clear light on what we sign up for when we allow a human soul to come through us and into the world, in whatever ‘interesting and beautiful package’ that soul might find. . . [She] teases out the glory, charm and humor of these moments, letting us adore her child with her.” —Kate Braestrup, New York Times Book Review 

Heather Lanier is an essayist, memoirist, and poet. The author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks, including The Story You Tell Yourself, winner of the Wick Poetry Open Chapbook Competition, her nonfiction has appeared in Salon, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Vela, and elsewhere. She has received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a Vermont Creation Grant, and is Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Rowan University. 

Stephen Kuusisto directs The Burton Blatt Institute’s Programs in disability at Syracuse University, where he holds a University Professorship. He is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey; Planet of the Blind, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”; and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening; and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light, Letters to Borges, and Old Horse, What Is To Be Done?

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Heather Lanier
Raising a Rare Girl

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