Alison Townsend is the author of a memoir-in-essays, The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home (shortlisted for the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay and the Wisconsin Book Award); two books of poetry, Persephone in America and The Blue Dress; and a short prose volume, The Persistence of Rivers. Her newest poetry collection, American Lonely, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books in Spring 2026. Her poems and essays appear widely, in journals such as About Place, Blackbird, Catamaran, The Kenyon Review, Parabola, The Southern Review and Under the Sun. Her work has been recognized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays. Her many awards include a Pushcart Prize in poetry, the Rattle Poetry Prize, the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize, the Lorine Niedecker Award, as well as residencies at the Spring Creek Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Dorland Mountain Arts, and other colonies. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. There she received the David Saunders Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities, and taught creative nonfiction, poetry, nature writing, and women’s life writing for many years, following a career in bookselling. With her husband she stewards four acres of restored prairie and oak savanna atop a drumlin in the farm country outside Madison. Alison’s experience of early motherloss precipitated a quest for home and belonging underpinned by a search for identify connected to the natural world—all themes that inform her work. She is fascinated with place, memory, and the roles that landscape and creativity play in shaping the self and the imagination.
