Alison Hawthorne Deming was born and grew up in Connecticut. 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; three additional poetry books, The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (LSU, 1997), Genius Loci (Penguin, 2005), and Rope(Penguin, 2009); and three nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands (Mercury House, 1994; Picador USA, 1996), The Edges of the Civilized World (Picador USA, 1998), finalist for the PEN Center West Award, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real (Milkweed, Credo Series). She has recently completed a new nonfiction book titled Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit.

She edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (Columbia University Press, 1996) and coedited with Lauret E. Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed, 2002; revised and expanded edition, 2011). Deming’s small press works include two limited edition chapbooks, Girls in the Jungle: What Does It Take For a Woman to Survive in the Arts (Kore Press, 1995) and Anatomy of Desire: The Daughter/Mother Sessions (Kore, 2000), a collaboration with her daughter, the artist Lucinda Bliss. 

Deming received an MFA from Vermont College (1983), a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University (1987-88), two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1990, 1995), and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Tucson/Pima Arts Council, and a National Writer’s Voice Residency Award, 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 of the Arts, Djerassi Foundation, Mesa Refuge, The Island Institute in Alaska, Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland, and the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon. 

She has served on the faculty of the Prague Summer Program, Taos Summer Writer’s Conference, University of Montana’s Environmental Writing Institute, Indiana University Writers’ Conference, and as Poet-in-Residence at the Jacksonville (FL) Zoo and Gardens, among many other venues.

Her poems and essays have been widely published and anthologized, including in The Georgia Review, Orion, Isotope, Southwestern American Literature, Parthenon West, Sierra, Gnosis, Verse and Universe: Poems on Science and Mathematics, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and Best American Science and Nature Writing.

Former Director of the University of Arizona Poetry (1990-2002), she currently is Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona and also serves as Chairperson of the Board of Directors for Orion magazine. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and Grand Manan, New Brunswick. 

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