Alison Townsend

Alison Townsend is the author of two books of poetry, The Blue Dress, selected for the Marie Alexander Prose Poem series at White Pine Press, and Persephone in America, which won the Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition. A collection of short prose, The Persistence of Rivers: An Essay on Moving Water, won the Jeanne Lieby Nonfiction Prize. Her poetry and essays appear widely, in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Parabola, The Southern Review, and Under the Sun, and have been recognized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays 2020. Her awards include a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Chancellor’s Regional Literary Award (for contributions to the literature of the Upper Midwest), and the 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize. She’s had residencies at Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Spring Creek Project, and Write On, Door County. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she taught creative nonfiction. She and her climate-activist husband live on four acres of prairie and oak savanna in the Wisconsin farm country, the inspiration for her memoir-in-essays, The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2022.