Alison Hawthorne Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946 Hartford, Connecticut) is an American poet, and essayist.

Life
Deming is a descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne. She worked in health care for fifteen years. She graduated in 1983 with a M.F.A. in Writing, from Vermont College, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts. She taught at the University of Southern Maine. In 1997, she was visiting Writer, at the University of Hawai’i. In 1999, she was Lecturer at Center for the American West.

She has taught at the University of Arizona since 1980. She lives near Aqua Caliente Hill in Tucson, Arizona. Her daughter is the artist Lucinda Bliss.

Awards

 * 1998 Finalist, PEN Center West Award for Creative Nonfiction, for The Edges of the Civilized World
 * 1995 Poetry Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts
 * 1994 Walt Whitman Award selected by Gerald Stern
 * 1993 Pushcart Prize (nonfiction), Pushcart Press
 * 1992 Gertrude B. Claytor Memorial Award, Poetry Society of America, New York, NY
 * 1990 Poetry Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts

Publicationss

 * "The Dream of a Moral Life", UA Poetry Center