I will stop talking and we'll bring up
the introducer for Alison now, who's a good friend.
Diana Liverman, a professor of geography here
at the University of Arizona.
A friend of the Poetry Center.
One of the leading thinkers about climate change anywhere
and we're so grateful that she's here in Tucson with us.
Thank you.
OK., Well, good evening, and thank you.
I was here at the beginning of the series
to talk about climate change, but tonight I'm
going to talk about Alison Hawthorne Deming.
And I'm very honored to introduce her.
She's a treasure for us at the University of Arizona
and far beyond.
And because Alison conveys such empathy and vision
of her nature and the planet, I've
got a few slides just to give us a sense of nature
beyond where we are.
And I'm beginning with daffodils and a little bit
of personal story because so much of Allison's writing
is personal.
And I begin with daffodils because that's
where I found my first connections between poetry
and nature.
We spent family holidays in the English Lake District, hiking,
messing around in rowboats, and reading when it rained.
My dad would sometimes read us poetry.
When I climbed my first 3,000 foot mountain--
and that's a really big mountain in England--
at the age of 10 or so, it was a long,
steep hike culminating along a terrifying glacial arête.
My dad pulled out a small book of poems by William Wordsworth
and he read me "On Her First Ascent
to the Summit of Helvellyn."
And this is Helvellyn in this photo.
Soon after that, I became a little obsessed
with the Lake District.
Its Ice Age topographies and its poets and writers.
And it was probably around that time
that I decided I would study geography and study
the environment.
Many years later, my love of geography,
which I was then studying at UCLA,
and to be honest my crush on a fellow geography student, who
came from Tucson, brought me to the Sonoran desert
and another assembly of creative writers.
Like my dad, this friend liked to take books on our hikes
into the Pinacate and the Catalinas.
And he would read Lauren Isley, Edward Abbey, and Gary Snyder.
I recount this personal history to explain
why I'm so delighted and amazed to introduce another great poet
and essayist of landscapes, life, and living nature, Alison
Hawthorne Deming, to you this evening.
Although I haven't yet taken one of her books on a hike,
we all should.
And they're over there, for you to pick up.
And many of them won't add a lot of weight to your backpack.
She writes beautifully and concisely in many cases.
And she writes exactly the sort of essays and poems
that need to be read in nature.
I first encountered Alison's writings
when I first moved to Arizona in 1994.
And someone gave me her edit-- no, 1996.
Someone gave me her edited anthology on poetry in the West
as a welcome gift.
Soon after, my own research on environmental issues in Mexico
brought me to Alison again through her poem sequence
on the monarch butterflies, so threatened and needing
of publicity and protection.
And I actually think back then I was head of Latin American
Studies and we helped bring Homero Aridjis out to Tucson.
I initially assumed that Alison belonged
to and in the Southwest, but anyone who knows or reads
Alison understands that we in Arizona
have to share her with another landscape
in the opposite corner of the continent.
She has a home on Grand Manan Island
in New Brunswick, Canada, to which she frequently
escapes in body and in writing.
And in fact, I'm surprised you haven't been hiding there
since the last election.
When I became director of the New
Institute of the Environment here, one of my goals
was to include the humanities.
And Alison was the first person I
thought of from the humanities to join our advisory board.
Alison is a professor of English who
has derived-- directed the creative writing program
in the Department of English.
And for most of you would know that she directed this Poetry
Center from 1990 to 2002.
She currently holds the Agnese Nelms Haury
chair in Environment and Social Justice.
So I re-read some of Alison's work
in preparing to introduce her tonight.
And one thing about creative writers,
especially compared to scientists,
in their extreme boringness about not sharing anything
about themselves, is that you learn
a lot about their personal lives,
the lives of creative writers, from their poems and essays.
Their deepest thoughts and emotions.
We know, from her writing, that Alison was a college dropout
to raise a wonderful daughter.
That she worked for 15 years in public health
before completing her MFA.
And that she lost her mother and brother to cancer
and mourns them still.
She finds solace and inspiration in wild places, and animals,
and our long evolutionary history,
and in research and scientific discovery.
Alison is the author of many books of essays and poems.
And she's edited two anthologies.
And in order for you to recognize
which ones you should pick up afterwards,
I show many of her books of essays and poems here.
Her 1994 collection Science and Other Poems
won the Walt Whitman award.
Her Monarch sequence was published in 1997.
Other poetry works include "Genius Loci" and "Rope."
Essay collections include Temporary Homelands,
The Edge of the Civilized World, Writing the Sacred
into the Real, and my favorite, her last book
of essays in 2014, Zoologies, which
explores the relation and meaning of the relationship
between humans and animals.
Stalking Alison on the internet I
found these two delightful images of encounters
between Alison and animals.
Although from Zoologies, she has yet
to meet a woolly mammoth or a rabbit from Mars.
So in honor of the first chapter of Zoologies,
I bought her a small mammoth to meet tonight.
In twenty-- I hope he's not too distracting.
My 10-month-old puppy has been looking yearningly
at the mammoths for several days,
to disembowel it in the tradition of Alison's
engagement with the rawer, tougher side of nature.
To talk a little bit more about Alison, in 2016,
she published two new books of poetry, Stairway
to Heaven, from which I believe she
will read a lot tonight, and Death Valley: Painted Light.
She has published her work in many journals and magazines,
including Orion, American Scientist, and the Georgia
Review.
And her writing has been widely anthologized.
She's been honored in so many ways I
can't read them all out to you.
She received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship
from Stanford University, two poetry fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts,
and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown, the Arizona Commission on the Arts,
the Tucson Pima Arts Council, and the National Writer's Voice
Residency award.
Her work has been awarded the Pablo Neruda prize
from Nimrod, a Pushcart Prize, the Gertrude B. Claytor
Award from the Poetry Society of America,
and the Bayer Award for Science Writing in Creative Nonfiction.
She's held residencies at Yaddo, Mesa Refuge, the Island
Institute, and many others, and is
very popular in being invited to speak at other colleges
and universities.
Most recently, she was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim
Fellowship.
We are very fortunate to have Alison with us tonight.
Please join me in welcoming our very own Alison Hawthorne
Deming.