Trident Author Series

Alison Hawthorne Deming

Tuesday April 15 - 6:30PM-7:30PM

BLUE FLAX & YELLOW MUSTARD FLOWER

&

THE GIFT OF ANIMALS

About Alison:

Poet, essayist, and editor Alison Hawthorne Deming, grew up in New England, steeped in literary and naturalist traditions. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she has published six books of poetry and five books of nonfiction, with two books 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 coedited 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 in NYC. Her other awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Borchard Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and 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.

New Books:

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR NEW BOOKS BY ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING

BLUE FLAX & YELLOW MUSTARD FLOWER, Red Hen Press, (Pub date, March 4th 2025)

“Alison Hawthorne Deming’s new collection, Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower is a rich catalog of the Anthropocene, including history, research, and initiative. In the tradition of Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and Pattiann Rogers––Deming pays extraordinary attention to the natural world. With skillful use of scientific detail, music, place, and the power of naming things, she sounds an alarm and a call to action. Moving deftly from the short lyric to the long narrative to prose: “each word an act / of defiance against the unspeakable.” Poem after poem reads like a “little locus of beauty to counter the decay.” This collection is an homage to naturalists and explorers, to environmental consciousness, to curiosity and to service––it is a lyric acknowledgement of the delicate balance of life.” --Ellen Bass

“Alison Hawthorne Deming is not a poet for whom environmental writing is merely a subject or an aspect of her brand.  For this true poet, nature is nothing less than a beyond-one’s-own-life existential presence.  As with Merwin, Snyder, and Hillman, I read Deming’s complex work both for its powerful engagements with nature and the vivifying inventions of its music.  Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower provides us such abundance: vigilance but also awe, documentation alongside discovery, and formal designs that range from quantitative syllabics to the open fields of free verse and prose poetry.  In the end Deming’s artful strategies are—as in areas as diverse as physics, sociobiology, and grammar—deeply relational.  Each “chatter, dirge, thesis, and psalm” is what it is in vital symbiosis with the rest.” --David Baker 

THE GIFT OF ANIMALS, Storey Press (Pub Date, April 1st )

The Gift of Animals is a wonderful book, the rare treasure that you will want to give to all your friends, even as you keep a copy close beside you. Brilliantly selected and meaningfully arranged, the poems unfold one after another – perfectly observed, rambunctious, hilarious or heartbreaking, astonishing, revelatory or mysterious, loving. In our cosmic loneliness, the company of animals is a great gift that asks in return only that we notice them, respect them, keep a safe place for them on Earth. The poetry of The Gift of Animals is a beautiful invitation to that moral relationship.   — Kathleen Dean Moore, author Earth’s Wild Music

The Gift of Animals offers us a fascinating treasure trove of the most surprising (re)connections to oysters, flamingoes, snakes, and a whole lyrical host of other dazzling heartbeats that beat the same as ours, no matter how many chambers. This collection of fins, fur, scales, and wings echoes a most satisfying call back to our mutual, extraordinary home: Earth.  –Aimee Nezhukumatathil 

This gorgeous collection of encounters feels like an antidote to species loneliness, providing a multifaceted lens on our desire for communion with the more-than-human world. --Robin Wall Kimmerer