Alison Hawthorne Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946 Hartford, Connecticut) is an American poet, essayist and teacher, currently Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Life

Deming was born and grew up in Connecticut. She is a great-granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. She worked in health care for fifteen years, including a decade with Planned Parenthood.^[1] In 1983 she received an M.F.A. in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has also been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts. She recevied two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1990 she became Director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, where she served until 2002, also teaching in the UA Creative Writing Program. She was Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i in 1997 and has taught in many venues including the Prague Summer Program, Bread Loaf/Orion Environmental Writer's Workshop, University of Montana Environmental Writing Institute, Taos Summer Writer's Conference, Indiana University Writers' Conference and many other venues. She served as poet-in-residence at the Jacksonville (FL) Zoo and Gardens as part of the Language of Conservation Project for Poet's House. She has had residencies at the Yaddo, Djeraasi Resident Artist's Program, The Mesa Refuge, The Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, The Hermitage Artists Retreat and the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest among others.

She has taught at the University of Arizona since 1990 and was appointed Agnes Nelms Haury Chair in 2014. ^[2] She lives in Tucson, Arizona^[3] and Grand Manan, New Brunswick, Canada. Her daughter is the artist Lucinda Bliss.^[4]

Awards

• 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 2015 Essay in Best American Science and Nature Writing
• 2014 Senior Fellow, Spring Creek Project, Department of Philosophy, Oregon State University
• 2010 Best Essay Gold, GAMMA Awards, Magazine Association of the Southeast, essay in The Georgie Review
• 2007 Essay in Best American Science and Nature Writing
• 1998 Bayer Award in Science Writing, Creative Nonfiction
• 1998 Finalist, PEN Center West Award for Creative Nonfiction, for The Edges of the Civilized World
• 1995 Poetry Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts
• 1994 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets selected by Gerald Stern
• 1993 Pushcart Prize (nonfiction), Pushcart Press
• 1992 Gertrude B. Claytor Memorial Award, Poetry Society of America, New York, NY
• 1990 Poetry Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts
• 1983 Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod

Works

• Deming's work has been widely published and anthologized including in Ecotone, Orion, The Georgia Review, terrain.org, OnEarth, Parthenon West, Hawk and Handsaw, Sierra, Gnosis, American Poetry Review, Eleven Eleven, Western Humanities Review, The Massachusetts Review, Cutthroat, Verse and Universe: Poems on Science and Mathematics, The Norton Book of Nature Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing.
• Two new poetry books will be out in 2016, Death Valley: Painted Light (George F. Thompson Publisher), a collaboration with photographer Stephen E. Strom and Stairway from Heaven from Penguin.

Poetry

• Rope (poems). Penguin Poets. 2009. ISBN 978-0-14-311636-3.
• Genius Loci (poems). Penguin Poets,. 2005. ISBN 978-0-14-303520-6.
• The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1997. ISBN 978-0-8071-2230-3.
• Girls in the Jungle: What Does it Take for a Woman to Survive as an Artist?. Kore Press. ISBN 978-1-888553-02-4.
• Science and Other Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1994. ISBN 978-0-8071-1914-3.

Essays

• Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit, Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 2014, ISBN 978-1-57131-348-5
• Writing the Sacred into the Real, Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, Credo Series, 2001, ISBN 1-57131-249-8
• Field Notes on Hands. Monograph Series #21. Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. 2007.
• The Edges of the Civilized World. New York: St. Martin's/Picador USA. 1998. ISBN 978-0-312-19543-4.
• Temporary Homelands. New York: Mercury House. 1994. ISBN 978-1-56279-062-2.

Anthologies

• Alison Deming and Lauret E. Savoy, ed. (2002). The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity and the Natural World. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions. ISBN 978-1-57131-267-9.Revised and expanded edition, 2011.
• Alison Hawthorne Deming, ed. (1996). Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-10386-7.

References

1. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=81211
2. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/355
3. http://mainehumanities.org/podcast/archives/290
4. http://www.alisonhawthornedeming.com/media/bio.htm

External links

• "Author's website"
• "Poet Alison Hawthorne Deming on What Nature Teaches -- If We Listen", August 16, 2008, On Earth
• Interview with Deming on Words on a Wire
• "Interview: Alison Hawthorne Deming - MFA Program Director", Adriann Ranta, Editorial Department