Leigh Herrick is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated poet and writer, as well as a past recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant. She is also an alumnus of Vermont Studio Center where, in 2001, just after 9/11, she wrote the bulk of her book Home Front.
Herrick was selected as one of “The Sixty-Four” best poets of 2019 by Black Mountain Press. As an engaged poet and writer for over 30 years, Herrick’s work has included public performance, readings, and testimony at numerous coffee houses, bars, galleries, and institutions including The Loft, The University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Public Schools, Hamline University (St. Paul), Amazon Bookstore (Minneapolis), A Room of One’s Own Bookstore (Madison, WI), Innisfree Poetry Bookstore (Boulder, CO), Vermont Studio Center, and Red Wing High School (MN). Her poetry, vispo, collaborations, and photography have most frequently been featured in surrealist and avant-garde publications, many of which are searchable online and on this website.
Herrick spent 12 years training in traditional hand drumming and is ever-grateful for her beloved teachers, master drummers in their own right: Layne Redmond, Marcos “Chico” Perez, and Wallace Hill. Much of what is heard in Herrick's work is due to her long-standing interest and training in rhythmic traditions, including Afro-Caribbean conga and Middle Eastern frame drumming.
Herrick also writes fiction and creative non-fiction. Her work is most often subversive, decidedly feminist, and eco-conscious. Her poetry ranges from traditional forms to the experimental, avant-garde, and surreal. But in the undertones of much of her work, Herrick remains dedicated to helping eradicate all things non-egalitarian, and to re/membering Women and Girls who remain subject/s to the imposed limits of personal and political power due to their gender while under a system of patriarchy that is steeped in behavioral toxicity.
When not writing, Leigh works the soil and is engaged in restoration planting, gardening, and tending a wide variety of edibles and plants that provide food for pollinators, birds, and small mammals – the range of beings who often join her in the yard, or who are observed from a kitchen window. Not the least of these beings is Herrick’s latest sidekick, a mini-schnauzer named Gracie.
