Alison Hawthorne Deming

Board of Directors Member, Terrain Publishing
Editorial Board Member, Terrain.org

Alison Hawthorne Deming was born and grew up in Connecticut. Her most recent books are the poetry collection Stairway to Heaven (Penguin 2016) and Death Valley: Painted Light, a collaboration with photographer Stephen Strom (George F. Thomson 2016). The essay collection Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit was published by Milkweed Editions in 2014. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of Science and Other Poems, selected by Gerald Stern for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and three additional poetry books: The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence, Genius Loci, and Rope. Alison’s earlier nonfiction books are Temporary Homelands, The Edges of the Civilized World, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real. She edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology and co-edited with Lauret E. Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. Her work has won numerous awards, including a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pablo Neruda Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Bayer Award in Science Writing from Creative Nonfiction for the essay “Poetry and Science: A View From the Divide.” Her poems and essays have been widely published and anthologized, including in The Georgia Review, Orion, Sierra, OnEarth, Verse and Universe: Poems on Science and Mathematics, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and Best American Science and Nature Writing. She currently is Agnese Nelms Haury Chair of Environment and Social Justice in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. She is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow.