Helen Pruitt Wallace received her Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from Florida State University
and is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at Eckerd College. In 2015, she launched Poetry at the
Dalí, a monthly reading series she curates for the Dalí Museum. She served as St. Petersburg’s Poet
Laureate from 2016 through 2022.
The winner of a Florida Book Award, Helen’s first collection of poems, Shimming the Glass House,
won the Richard Snyder Prize and was published by Ashland Poetry Press. Her chapbook, Pink
Streets, was published by Yellow Jacket Press, and she was Co-editor of the Anhinga Press anthology, Isle of Flowers. Helen’s individual poems and essays have been published in The Literary Review, Plume, Tampa Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Slowdown podcast, Nimrod International, Harvard Review, River Teeth, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and other journals and anthologies. Awards include an Outstanding Teaching Award from Florida State University, a John MacKay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award, the dA Center for the Arts Poetry Award, a residency fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
She and her husband, Peter, both grew up in St. Petersburg and raised their children there.
