Sydney Hegele
Sydney Hegele grew up in the Greenbelt in Southern Ontario. They are the author of Bird Suit (Invisible Publishing, 2024) and The Pump (Invisible Publishing 2021), which was the winner of the 2022 ReLit Literary Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award. Their debut novel Bird Suit is a queer Southern Ontario Gothic folktale about a tourist town, bird women, and the stories we tell ourselves about interfamilial violence, memory, and blame. Their poetry chapbook The Last Thing I Will See Before I Die was published with 845 Press in 2022.
Their essays have appeared in Catapult, Electric Literature, and EVENT, and have been featured by Lithub, The Poetry Foundation, and Psychology Today. Their essay collection Bad Kids: A Polyphony is forthcoming with Invisible in Spring 2026.
Sydney’s work often explores small-town queerness, environmental justice, mental illness, religious life, and the complicated relationships between these things. They live with their husband and French Bulldog in Tkaronto (Toronto).
Photo by Angela Lewis
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​Sydney's poetry and fiction have been published in American Chordata, The Portland Review, CV2, Room Magazine, The Quarantine Review, and others. Their short story "The Bottom" was shortlisted for The Malahat Review 2020 Open Season Awards.
Sydney is on faculty at both the Lighthouse Writer's Workshop in Denver, Co, and Writing Workshops.com, where they teach craft workshops for both the Adult and Youth programs. Most recently, Sydney has taught 8-Week courses on short story writing and craft as a healing practice for traumatic experiences.
A member of the Writer’s Union of Canada, Sydney has taught fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and publishing workshops for both adults and youth through Western University, York University, McMaster University, Leading Word, The Conference of Independent Teachers of English, Kings College, Community Craft Classes, Pride London, and many others.
Sydney currently serves as Prose editor of The Temz Review. They are a former fiction editor of Patchwork Literary Magazine at the University of Iowa, and a fiction and poetry reader for The Boston Review.
They are a former Artist-in-Residence at the Flick the Switch Artist Collective in Toronto, Canada (2022-2024), Western University Student-Writer-in-Residence (2017-2018), and Emerging Artist-in-Residence at the TAP Centre for Creativity in London, Ontario (2019-2020).
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Sydney received their Honours degree in English Language & Literature and Creative Writing at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada (2018), and they are an Alumnus of both the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Lighthouse Advanced Writer’s Workshop (under Sheila Heti).
Grants
It is with immense gratitude that I have been awarded several professional artist grants to support two of my full-length projects. I want to publicly thank the following organizations for their support of my work:
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