Derek Sheffield

Board of Directors Member, Terrain Publishing
Poetry Editor, Terrain.org

Derek Sheffield’s collection, Not for Luck, was selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. His other books include Through the Second Skin, finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and A Revised Account of the West, selected by Debra Marquart for the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award. He is a coeditor of two collections, Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including The Southern Review, Poetry, The Georgia Review, Orion, The Gettysburg Review, Northwest Review, and AGNI. He has been awarded fellowships from the Spring Creek Project, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Artist Trust, Allied Arts, 4Culture, and the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest. Other honors include the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee, a finalist selection for the 2018 Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize judged by Vijay Seshadri, and a Special Mention in the 2016 Pushcart Anthology.

He lives with his family in the eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountains near Leavenworth, Washington, where he birds, fishes, hikes, gardens, forest bathes, and parents. He takes much delight in the fact that his daughters know many of their fellow plant and animal beings and are often busy making their own poems and paintings when they aren’t assembling twigs, leaves, and grasses into nests and boats for Fairies. He’s been fortunate enough to bird with both J. Drew Lanham and David Allen Sibley. As a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College, he teaches poetry and ecological writing and serves as co-chair of the Sustainability Committee. Catch up with him at www.DerekSheffield.com.