The Gift of Animals

Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of five nonfiction books, including Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit, and five poetry collections including Stairway to Heaven and Science and Other Poems, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets; as well as the editor of Poetry of the American West and co-editor of The Colors of Nature. Her work also appears in the Norton Book of Nature Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing. Deming served as poet-in-residence at the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens in Florida, where she curated a poetry installation, and as poet-in-residence at the Milwaukee Public Library and Milwaukee Museum where she curated a poetry installation along with programming shared by the two institutions. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair of Environment and Social Justice, she is currently Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona.