Gloria Heffernan is the author of the poetry collection, What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books), and Exploring Poetry of Presence: A Companion Guide for Readers, Writers, and Workshop Facilitators (Back Porch Productions). She has also written two chapbooks, Some of Our Parts (Finishing Line Press), and Hail to the Symptom, (Moonstone Press).

Gloria’s poetry and fiction have appeared in over eighty journals including Chautauqua Literary Journal, Presence, Columbia Review, Stone Canoe, The Healing Muse, and The Perch. Gloria has been a Pushcart nominee, a finalist in the Grayson Poetry Chapbook Contest, a finalist in the Naugatuck River Review’s Narrative Poetry Contest, and winner of Third Wednesday's One Sentence Poetry Contest. She holds an M.A. from New York University and teaches at Le Moyne College and the Downtown Writers Center in Syracuse, New York. She is also a workshop facilitator with a focus on poetry as a spiritual practice.

I believe the best poems are conversations—the kind of conversations that you recall word-for-word forty years later.  Those are the poems I carry with me like prayers.  For me, one of those poems is Galway Kinnell’s “St. Francis and the Sow,” which reminds us that “everything flowers from within, of self-blessing.” Poetry itself is a form of blessing.  We can draw on it in the moments when we need to center ourselves, dare to hope, seek peace.  The connection between poetry and prayer has always been for me what the Irish call “a thin place,” where the boundary between the earthly and the divine is all but erased.  I am grateful to be part of the thin place that is Presence. I look forward to sharing the rich conversations and blessings each issue will produce.