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. The book has been selected as the winner of the North Carolina Poetry Society's 2025 Lena M. Shull Book Award, marking Hettich’s second time receiving this distinguished honor. 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.”

While Waking Up Alone may speak especially strongly to readers who have experienced recent loss, Hettich hopes the book will resonate more broadly. “Since we all have to experience grief and loss,” he says, “I would hope its appeal would be wider than that. As always, my goal is to engage readers’ imaginations and emotions through the authenticity of image and language.”

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.

Michael Hettich is the author of more than fifteen full-length poetry collections and a dozen chapbooks. His three most recent books include A Sharper Silence (Terrapin Books, 2025); The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990–2022 (Press 53, 2023), which won the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society; and The Mica Mine (St. Andrews University Press, 2021), which won the 2020 Lena M. Shull Book Award.