Board of Advisors

Alison Hawthorne Deming
Poet, Professor, Creative Writing, University of Arizona

 Poet and essayist Alison Hawthorne Deming is Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Science and Other Poems (LSU Press, 1994), selected by Gerald Stern for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (LSU, 1997); and Genius Loci (Penguin, 2005).  Deming has also published three nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands (Mercury House, 1994), The Edges of the Civilized World (Picador USA, 1998), which was a finalist for the PEN Center West Award, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real (Milkweed Editions 2001).  She edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (Columbia University Press, 1996) and co-edited with Lauret E. Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity and the Natural World (Milkweed, 2002).

Deming received an MFA from Vermont College in 1983 and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in 1987-88. Her writing has won numerous awards and honors, including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod, a Pushcart Prize, the Gertrude B. Claytor Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Bayer Award in science writing from Creative Nonfiction for the essay “Poetry and Science: A View from the Divide.” She has held residencies at Yaddo, Cummington Community for the Arts, the Djerassi Foundation, Mesa Refuge, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland, and the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest.

She has served on the faculty of Prague Summer Seminars, Writers at Work, Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, Art of the Wild, The Orion Society's Forgotten Language Tour, the Sitka Symposium on Human Values and the Written Word, and numerous other writing programs. In 1997 she was Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai'i in Manoa.

Her poems and essays have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, Orion, Islands, The Pushcart Prize XVIII: Best of the Small Presses, American Nature Writing, Verse and Universe: Poems on Science and Mathematics and the Norton Book of Nature Writing.

Return to Listing