Photograph by Mena Baltazar
[Image description: Day, a young white person with dirty blond hair pulled back in a bun, looks into the camera. They wear a lime-green turtleneck, black pants, a pair of golden earrings, and a golden septum piercing. They have tattoos on their arms and are holding a large pink lily at chest level.]
Day Heisinger-Nixon is a poet, essayist, interpreter, and translator. Their debut poetry collection, ROOM | ROOM | ROOM, recipient of the 2024 Other Futures Award, is set for publication with Futurepoem in 2026.
Raised in an ASL-English bilingual home in Fresno, California, Day holds an MA in Deaf Studies: Cultural Studies from Gallaudet University and an MFA in Creative Writing: Poetry from New England College.
Their essays and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming from Apogee Journal, Peach Mag, Boston Review, Foglifter, Nat. Brut, and elsewhere. A three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and a nominee for the Best of the Net Prize, Day’s work has received recognition from Witness Magazine, Indiana Review, Boston Review, and Death Rattle Writers Festival, among other organizations.
As an interpreter, Day works primarily between ASL, English, International Sign, and Spanish. In addition to these, Day holds varying levels of proficiency in several other languages, spoken and signed. They seek to practice a language justice-informed model of language work, and largely specialize in academic, conference, liaison, and solidarity interpreting. Day has interpreted in more than 20 countries in Europe, Asia, and North America.
They are currently based in València, Spain.
SELECTED ONLINE PUBLICATIONS
Apogee | “Mechanisms of Blue”
Booth | “Thirteen Ways of Looking…” & “Publick Universal Friend Flirts with Typhus”
Boston Review | “Room, Room, Room in the many…” & “Publick Universal Friend Adopts a More Androgynous…”
Call Me [Brackets] | “Publick Universal Friend Pauses…” & “Publick Universal Friend Sees the Signs”
Disability Studies Quarterly | “On Crip Horizons”
Gasher Press | “Étude”
The Lickety~Split | “Ars Poetica”
Malasaña | “In an Ecosystem, Everything Has a Name”
Nat. Brut | “Gender is a Room, Gender is a Field: On Metaphor”
Oroboro | “Publick Universal Friend Contends…” & “Poplerne ved Hobro…”
Peach Mag | “Aubade [ ]”
Plum Recruit | “HORS_” & “Window, Museum of Modern Art…”
Post Road | “Notes from a Field on Fire,” “Félix González-Torres– ‘Untitled’…” & “Multiclausal Exercises in Translation”
Riggwelter Press | “After David”
Underblong | “On Surplus Value” & “In Which a Single World…”
SELECTED PRINT PUBLICATIONS
Always Crashing | “The Family Photo Albums” & “Clinical File, Genetics…”
Booth | “Thirteen Ways of Looking…” & “Publick Universal Friend Flirts with Typhus”
Boston Review | ‘“Room, Room, Room, in the many…”’
Foglifter | “Following their Rebirth…” & “Publick Universal Friend Meets the Doctor”
Second Factory | “Even Publick Universal Friend’s Father…”
Witness Magazine | “Sestina Re-Sequenced, Serotonin Returned”