Alison Hawthorne Deming is an award winning poet and nonfiction writer. Her new nonfiction book A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress was published by Counterpoint Press in August, 2021. Her most recent books are the poetry collection Stairway to Heaven and Death Valley: Painted Light, a collaboration with photographer Stephen Strom, and 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, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence, Genius Loci, and Rope; and three additional nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands, The Edges of the Civilized World, a finalist for the PEN Center West Award, 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.
Deming received an MFA from Vermont College, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Tucson/Pima Arts Council, and the National Writer’s Voice.
Her work has been widely published, including in The Norton Book of Nature Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing.She has held residencies at Yaddo, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Mesa Refuge, Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, The Hermitage Artist Retreat and the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon.
Working with the Language of Conservation Project sponsored by Poets House in New York City, Deming curated the poetry installation at the Jacksonville (FL) Zoo and Gardens. Among her most keen interests is the intersection of art and science. Former Director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair of Environment and Social Justice, she is Regents Professor at the University of Arizona, where in 2015 she founded the Field Studies in Writing Program.