Shoah Train was chosen as one of five finalists in poetry for the 2004 National Book Award.

Over the decades Heyen has most often thought, studied, and written about the Holocaust. His ground-breaking collection The Swastika Poems (Vanguard Press, 1977) was revised and expanded to Erika (1984). Thirteen more of these poems appear in Falling from Heaven (Time Being Books, 1991). Now, Shoah Train collects more than seventy poems written over the last dozen years, lyrics of “discipline and honesty and courage and restraint,” as Archibald MacLeish described The Swastika Poems. Experiencing the new poems in Shoah Train, readers will find themselves in the voice-presence of one of our most important poets.

The author of eighteen books of poetry,Etruscan Advisory Board member William Heyen has been awarded Fulbright, NEA, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Guggenheim fellowships and prizes.  His Etruscan books include the anthology September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (2002) and the poetry books The Confessions of Doc Williams and Other Poems (2006) and A Poetics of Hiroshima (2008), which was a National Book Award finalist in 2004.

Publication date: December 2003

Read an excerpt of Shoah Train. 

Read Philip Brady on William Heyen in 2006 Provincetown Arts via the link here –> Heyen.pdf