Jennifer Heath
Jennifer Heath is an award winning cultural journalist, critic, curator, scholar, activist, and author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction. Born in Australia, raised in Japan, Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, she spent her formative years in Afghanistan before studying in Switzerland and Venezuela to finally land in Colorado. Heath's books encompass a range of interests from an appreciation of gardening, to the art of black velvet painting, to the dynamic world of the Middle East. As a cultural journalist, she founded The Arts Paper: A Cultural Journal of the Boulder Arts Commission in 2000, which successfully ran for six years before funding caused it to cease publication. While in circulation the periodical received high acclaim. In 1995, Heath created Baksun Books, a small press in Boulder, Colorado. It aims to provide authors opportunities for publishing texts that would otherwise be ignored in the mainstream market. Baksun Books relies on grants and donations for printing and disribution.
Health's curator endeavors have seen the national touring (US) of a velvet art exhibition partnered with her book Black Velvet: The Art We Love to Hate in 1992. Since then she has curated other exhibitions including the much praised The Veil: Visible and Invisible Space, as well as Resurrections: ECO-logy and ECO-nomy - A Functional Trash Exhibition, among others.
A love of gardening and environmental activism finds expression through Heath's works: The Echoing Green: The Garden in Myth and Memory and Uncontained: Writers and Photographers in the Garden and the Margins. These books contemplate the endangered ecology and ways that humans might come to a peaceful place on Earth through abidance in gardens.
After September 11, Heath's affection for gardens and the experience of her early years in Afghanistan enabled her to start Seeds for Afghanistan, an organization that began by collecting and distributing nearly two million packages of vegetable and flower seeds for the hungry citizens of Afghanistan. Heath is also the founder of Afghanistan Relief Organization Midwife Training and Infant Care Program, now International Midwife Assistance.
Heath's interest in the Middle East and Islam has resulted in the publication of A House White With Sorrow: A Ballad for Afghanistan (the proceeds of the second publication all go to Afghans4Tomorrow, an umbrella organization of Seeds for Afghanistan), The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam, and most recently the edited anthology The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics published by the University of California Press. Currently, Heath is working with Dr. Ashraf Zahedi co-authoring Women of Afghanistan in the Post-9/11 Era: Paths to Empowerment.