Simmons Buntin

President and Director of the Board of Directors, Terrain Publishing
Editor-in-Chief, Terrain.org

Simmons Buntin is the founding editor-in-chief of Terrain.org, the world’s first place-based online literary magazine, founded in 1997. He has published poetry, essays, and technical articles in publications as varied as Edible Baja Arizona, Orion, Kyoto Journal, and Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society. He has a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Colorado Denver, concluded by an award-winning thesis on sustainable suburban downtown redevelopment, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. His paying gig is as director of marketing and communications for the University of Arizona’s College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture. He lives in a small, mid-century townhome community in Tucson, Arizona, where somehow he got talked into being the HOA Board president.

Simmons has won an Academy of American Poets Prize, Colorado Artist’s Fellowship for Poetry, and grants from the U.S. Forest Service, Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Tucson-Pima Arts Council. His first book of poetry, Riverfall, was published in 2005 and his second, Bloom, was published in 2010, both by Ireland’s Salmon Poetry. His book Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places (co-authored with Ken Pirie) was published by Planetizen Press in 2013. Most recently he is the editor, with Elizabeth Dodd and Derek Sheffield, of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published on Earth Day 2020 by Trinity University Press. Catch up with him at www.SimmonsBuntin.com.