2007 EWI Workshop Leader

ALISON  HAWTHORNE  DEMING

Alison Hawthorne Deming was born and grew up in Connecticut.   She currently is Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona and lives near Aqua Caliente Hill in Tucson.

She has published three nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands (Mercury House, 1994; Picador USA, 1996), 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, Credo Series: Notable American Writers on Nature, Community and the Writer Life).

She is also 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, and listed among the Washington Post's Favorite Books of 1994 and Bloomsbury Review's Best Poetry books of the past fifteen years.   She is the author of two additional poetry books, The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (LSU, 1997), and Genius Loci (Penguin, 2005).

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).  Her small press works include two limited edition chapbooks, Girls In 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) and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University (1987-88). Her writing has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1990 and 1995), fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (1984-85), the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Tucson/Pima Arts Council, a Residency Award from the National Writer's Voice Project, the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod, 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, The Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, 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, Writing It Down For James: Writers On Life And Craft, Verse And Universe: Poems On Science And Mathematics And The Norton Book Of Nature Writing.

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