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Waking Up Alone is a powerful new poetry collection by Black Mountain, NC, poet Michael Hettich. The book has been selected as the winner of the 2025 Lena M. Shull Book Award, marking Hettich’s second time receiving this distinguished honor.

Written in the weeks following the death of Hettich’s wife, Colleen Ahern-Hettich, on January 13, 2025, Waking Up Alone is an unflinching and deeply moving meditation on grief, love, and the immediacy of loss. At the heart of the collection is a long poem composed quickly, with deliberate restraint against excessive revision, allowing the rawness of the language to carry the emotional weight of the experience.

“To make the poems more formally graceful would have felt like a kind of lying,” Hettich explains. “I tried to allow myself a more spontaneous utterance than I usually do, because the emotions themselves were immediate and unfiltered.”
Unlike much of his earlier work, which often draws on memory or imagined circumstances, Waking Up Alone emerges from lived experience unfolding in real time. The poems capture grief not as a distant reflection but as something actively endured—moments when language becomes both witness and companion.

Retired from Miami-Dade College, where he taught English for 28 years, Hettich has been writing poetry since his sophomore year of college. He credits his early exposure to poetry to his father, who read poems to him as a child, and to a formative classroom encounter with César Vallejo’s “Black Stone Lying on a White Stone,” which clarified his lifelong vocation as a poet.