Alison Deming is an American poet, essayist, and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice, and Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She was Director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and also taught in the UA Creative Writing Program. She was Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i 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 Mesa Refuge, she was a resident at 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. Alison was a Guggenheim Fellow. 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.
Alison was born and grew up in Connecticut. She worked in health care for fifteen years, including a decade with Planned Parenthood. Alison received an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and Grand Manan, New Brunswick, Canada. Alison is the author of nonfiction book A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress.
You can learn more about Alison here.