Alison Hawthorne Deming

Poet and essayist Alison Hawthorne Deming was born in Connecticut in 1946 and received an MFA from Vermont College University. She is the author of Stairway to Heaven (Penguin, 2016); Rope (Penguin, 2009); Genius Loci (Penguin, 2005); The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (Louisiana State University Press, 1997); and Science and Other Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1994), which was selected by Gerald Stern to receive the 1993 Walt Whitman Award.

Deming’s honors include the Pushcart Prize for Nonfiction, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. She edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (1996) and has published several books of prose, Writing the Sacred into Real (Milkweed Editions, 2001); The Edges of the Civilized World: A Journey in Nature and Culture (Picador USA, 1998), and Temporary Homelands (Mercury House, 1994), a collection of nature essays.

Deming was the director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center from 1990 until 2000. She is currently associate professor in creative writing at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson.