About Me
I am a literary nonfiction writer who focuses on natural history, ecology and the intersections of nature and culture. My poems, essays and articles have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Utne Reader, Orion, Conservation, Places, and Arizona Highways. I am the coauthor of Valley of Grass: Tallgrass Prairie and Parkland of the Red River Region, winner of a Minnesota Book Award for Nature Writing. With Minnesota ecologist Chel Anderson, I coauthored North Shore: A Natural History of Minnesota’s Superior Coast. A selection of my natural history columns for the online publication Zygote Quarterly appeared in the 2017 book Science of Seeing. I am currently working on a new book that explores the ecology of grief and loss in the sky islands of southeastern Arizona.
Nature also is the focus of my work as an educator at Arizona State University. As the former codirector of InnovationSpace, a sustainable product-development program, I led the program’s biomimicry initiative, which introduced students to the use of biology as a means of sustainable innovation in design, business and engineering.
As the former assistant director of ASU’s Biomimicry Center, I also initiated several biomimicry-based projects including “Designed to Move: Seeds That Float, Fly or Hitchhike through the Desert Southwest,” an exhibition of macrophotography that explored the beauty and functional diversity of desert seed designs. I also cofounded NatureMaker, an active learning library where hands-on explorations of nature inspire sustainable innovation. The project won ASU’s 2021 President’s Award for Innovation. I am currently an Affiliate Global Futures Scholar at ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.
I divide my time between the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona and South Mountain in the City of Phoenix, where I share my yard, and sometimes my house, with scorpions, southern house spiders, hummingbirds, nighthawks, coyotes, cactus wrens, screech owls and the occasional javelina.