Sandra Alcosser's Page

Montana gifted us over thirty years ago with friends, shelter and a sense of geologic time. The land fed books of poetry (A Fish to Feed All Hunger, Glyphs, Sleeping Inside the Glacier, A Woman Hit by a Meteor, The Blue Vein, Except by Nature) that received national awards. I often travel out of state to do residencies, direct an MFA at San Diego State University with brother poet Ilya Kaminsky, and teach with wonderful faculty and students at Pacific University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing. I have been most fortunate to work with Poets House New York to develop the Language of Conservation, a program that celebrates through poetry the sustainability of tribes and species across continents and centuries. I was also lucky to serve as Montana’s first poet laureate and to receive the Merriam Award for Distinguished Contribution to Montana Literature. Poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. For more biographical information, see Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets website.

I have worked as a poet-in-residence for the Wildlife Conservation Society and Poets House New York to curate a permanent six-acre installation of twenty-seven centuries of poetry in Central Park, read by a million international visitors each year (see it here). Because the understanding of the international conservation appeal doubled, we were awarded leadership grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, and have expanded the Language of Conservation to six cities. Mark Doty, Pattiann Rogers, Joseph Bruchac and Alison Hawthorne Deming join me as poets-in-residence. I followed my collaborator, wildlife biologist Dan Wharton, from WCS to Chicago Zoological Society to select poems for the Great Bear Wilderness (read press release). For more about poetry advocacy: "The Dialogue Between Poetry and Activism" is an essay by Amy Ratto based on an interview with me for Poet's Market in 2006.

POEMS The Entomologist's Landscape: Mare Frigoris Hats Michael's Wine Sweat Worms Skiing by Moonlight BOOKS A Fish to Feed All Hunger Except by Nature The Blue Vein Sleeping Inside the Glacier Glyphs The Blue Vein, Sleeping Inside the Glacier and Glyphs are the products of an ongoing collaboration with artist Michele Burgess.