Environmental Poetry in the Time of Climate Crisis

Poet, essayist, and editor Alison Hawthorne Deming, recipient of fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Borchard Center for Literary Arts, has published six books of poetry and five books of nonfiction. Two new books are out in 2025: the poetry collection Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower (Red Hen Press) and the anthology The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss, & Connection (Storey Press). She co-edited with Lauret E. Savoy the anthology The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. She served as Poet-in-Residence at the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens for the Language of Conservation; and the Milwaukee Public Museum and Milwaukee Public Library for Field Work, both projects sponsored by Poet’s House. Her other awards include fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and former Director of the UA Poetry Center. Currently she is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and Grand Manan, New Brunswick, Canada.

The Thoreauvian lineage of nature writing and the poetry of earth from Romanticism to the present were central to John Elder's teaching at Middlebury College.  His last four books each incorporate discussion of poetry and descriptions of the Vermont landscape into a framework of personal narrative. A Guggenheim Fellowship has supported this unfolding project. Since retiring from Middlebury John has become keenly interested in the pertinence of both classical Chinese poetry and the I Ching to the challenges of climate change.

Jody Gladding is a poet and translator, with five books of poems and forty translations from French by authors such as Marie-Claire Bancquart, Roland Barthes, Jean Giono, and Julia Kristeva. Her most recent poetry collection, I entered without words, appeared in 2022 in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. Her awards include MacDowell and Stegner Fellowships, French-American Foundation Translation Prize, Whiting Writers’ Award, and Yale Younger Poets Prize. She taught in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program and directed writing at the Vermont Studio Center. She lives and works in East Calais, Vermont.

Jane Hirshfield, writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), is among American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the founder of Poets For Science, a partner in the 2017 March for Science in Washington, D.C., Hirshfield’s most recent book is The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023). Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, ten selections in The Best American Poems, and Beijing University’s Zhongkun International Poet Prize.  She is also the author of two now-classic collections of essays on poetry's deep infrastructure and craft, Nine Gates and Ten Windows, and editor and co-translator of four books presenting the work of world poets from the deep past. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The TLS, Poetry, Orion, The Plant-Human Quarterly, and Scientific American, and has been translated into eighteen languages. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Nalini Nadkarni’s unique academic career interweaves her scientific research on rainforest canopy biota with innovative public engagement. She has written 150 scientific papers and three scholarly books on forest canopy-dwelling communities, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society. She also engages with those who do not or cannot gain access to science education, including faith-based groups, artists, corporations, and people who are incarcerated. Her work is featured in journals ranging from Science to Playboy, and in public media such as Science Friday, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and RadioLab. She writes and hosts a weekly NPR radio program on the wonder of trees, called TreeNote. In 2023, the National Geographic Society named her as one of their ten “Explorers at Large.” Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the AAAS Award for Public Engagement, the National Science Foundation Award for Public Service, The Rachel Carson Award for Conservation, The Wilson Award for the Advancement of Social Justice, and the Archie Carr Medal for Conservation.