
ABOUT
Heather Siegel is the author of two memoirs, and is currently at work on a debut women's fiction novel, GATERS.
A lifelong outsider shaped by an unusual childhood, Heather grew up watching from the margins—an accidental anthropologist drawn to the invisible dynamics of families, friendships, and belonging. That instinct led her to pursue an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at The New School and continues to inform her storytelling with humor and social insight.
A recipient of national and independent awards and honors, her coming-of-age memoir OUT FROM THE UNDERWORLD was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and her follow-up, THE KING & THE QUIRKY won the Next Generation Indie Book Award’s Gold Medal for Women’s Issues, both receiving critical acclaim. Her essays have appeared in HuffPost Personal, Salon, The Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop, The Belladonna Comedy, and numerous literary journals and anthologies.
Originally from California and New York, Heather now lives in South Florida, where she coaches student writers and walks her Golden Retriever through the Everglades—always on the lookout for what doesn’t quite belong.
Sarah Cottrell
Huffington Post Books
Heather Siegel is a master storyteller like none I have encountered.
Phillip Lopate
A graduate summa cum laude of the school of hard knocks, Heather Siegel has written this dark, riveting memoir with refreshing if mordant humor, rueful tenderness and compassion. She is a stunningly gifted storyteller
Vivian Gornick
Heather Siegel has taken the raw material of an unusually deranged childhood, and done with it what very few can do: fashioned a piece of writing so smart, funny, and insightful that, as we read, we see the narrator growing from a street-smart little cynic into a remarkably understanding woman. More one cannot ask of any memoirist.
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