Heather Laurel Jensen

Heather Laurel Jensen (she/they) is a junior studying Neuroscience, Arabic, and Creative Writing. She grew up in Mesa, Arizona, where she was heavily involved in the Phoenix-area arts community and served as the National Student Poet for the Southwest. As a co-founder of the Phoenix Youth Poet Laureate program, they witnessed firsthand the empowering force of storytelling on individuals and their communities, as well as the shaping influence of the natural environment upon interpersonal narratives. Currently, she volunteers as a research assistant in the Neuroscience of Emotion and Thought Lab and is the Editor-in-Chief of Arizona's undergraduate literary magazine, Persona. They hope to continue investigating the relationship between the organization of the natural world and human emotion and creative expression as a 2022-2023 Liverman Scholar.