Alison Deming

Alison Deming is an American poet, essayist and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and currently Regents Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Alison was born and grew up in Connecticut. She worked in health care for fifteen years, including a decade with Planned Parenthood. 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 also received 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 Zoo and Gardens as part of the Language of Conservation Project for Poet’s House. In addition to the Mesa Refuge, she has had residencies at the Yaddo, Djeraasi Resident Artist’s Program, 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. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and Grand Manan, New Brunswick, Canada. Her new nonfiction book A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress will be published by Counterpoint Press in 2021.

Read more about Alison and her work at https://alisonhawthornedeming.com.