Dr. Heather Fester directs the Nature and Human Values Program at Mines and regularly teaches classes in rhetoric, ethics, composition, and creative writing. She has a combined background in Rhetoric & Writing  and Creative Writing, which offers her a unique perspective on the humanities that she enjoys sharing with students. She has also administered various types of writing programs on the university level.

Before she returned to school to earn her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics as the Allen Ginsberg Fellow at Naropa University (2015-2017), Heather directed the Center for Writing and Scholarship at the California Institute of Integral Studies and coordinated the Writing Across the Curriculum and First-Year Writing programs at Lincoln University of Missouri. Most recently, she coordinated the Creative Writing minor in the English Department at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs where she enjoyed supporting faculty and students to build community around creative writing.

Her research interests include the rhetoric of ideologies, technology and rhetoric, creative and contemplative writing pedagogies, writing program administration, creative nonfiction, documentary poetics, and alternative discourses and composing methods. She has a textbook unit on thinking critically about fake news out from The Independent Thinking and Writing Company (2021). She is currently working on a collection of micro-essays, and she continues to write and think about holding a critically complex view when it comes to ideologies on college campuses and in the classroom.

Heather enjoys running, hiking, yoga, coaching, supporting cultural events along the front range, meeting with her writing groups, and pampering her ginger cat named Perry.

Curriculum Vitae

Courses Taught

• HASS 100 Nature and Human Values
• HASS 408 Creative Nonfiction Writing – Life Stories
• HASS 498 Special Topics – Rhetoric and Ideology

CCCC Handout (2023)