Alison Hawthorne Deming (She/her)
Alison Hawthorne Deming’s books include "Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower" and the poetry collection "Stairway to Heaven." The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and Walt Whitman Award, she is Regents Professor at the University of Arizona. She lives in Tucson and on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, Canada.
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Awards: Guggenheim Fellow, Pushcart Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, Stegner Fellowship, Walt Whitman Award, Pushcart Prize, Bayer Award Science Writing, Guggenheim Fellowship
Communities: Arizona Author, Tucsonan
Books:
Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower
Poetry
Red Hen Press
March 2025
ISBN 9781636282305
88 pages
A Woven World
On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress
Memoir / Essays / Creative Nonfiction
Counterpoint Press
August 2021
ISBN 9781640094826
256 pages
$26.00
Part memoir, part cultural history, A Woven World celebrates the fading crafts, industries, and artisans that have defined communities for generations.
The desire to create is the cornerstone of civilization. But as we move into a world where machine manufacturing has nearly usurped craft, Alison Hawthorne Deming resists the erasure of our shared history of handiwork with this appeal for embracing continuity and belonging in a time of destabilizing change.
Sensing a need to preserve the crafts and stories of our founding communities, and inspired by an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute featuring Yves St. Laurent’s “sardine” dress, Deming turned to the industries of her ancestors, both the dressmakers and designers in Manhattan in the nineteenth century and the fishermen on Grand Manan Island, a community of 2,500 residents, where the dignity of work and the bounty of the sea ruled for hundreds of years.
Reweaving the fabric of those lives, A Woven World gives presence on the page to the people, places, and practices, uncovering and preserving a record of the ingenuity and dignity that comes with such work. In this way the lament becomes a song of praise and a testament to the beauty and fragility of human making. More/less
