Teaching About Place: Learning From The Land

Contributors

c o n t r i b u t o r s s u e e l l e n c a m p b e l l , who grew up on what was then the eastern or plains edge of Denver and spent most summers in Colorado’s high mountains, now lives about eighty miles farther north in an irrigated valley between the hogbacks and the foothills. She teaches English at Colorado State University, hikes, camps, and travels when she can, reads a lot, and writes books, most recently Even Mountains Vanish: Searching for Solace in an Age of Extinction. l a i r d c h r i s t e n s e n was born and raised on an ice-age floodplain of the Columbia River and grew up taking for granted the sight of snowcapped volcanoes to the north and east. He still spends summers in Oregon, though he’s lived for seven years in western Vermont, where he directs the environmental studies graduate program at Green Mountain College. His poems and essays have appeared in a variety of books and journals, including Utne, Wild Earth, Whole Terrain, and Northwest Review. h a l c r i m m e l grew up on the northern edge of the Adirondacks but now lives along Utah’s Wasatch Front. He teaches writing and literature at Weber State University, and served in 2004 as a Fulbright scholar to Austria. He is the editor of Teaching in the Field: Working with Students 2 3 6 c o n t r i b u t o r s in the Outdoor Classroom. His 2007 book, Dinosaur: Four Seasons on the Green and Yampa Rivers, is one in a series on desert places. t e r r e l l d i x o n has lived in bayou country, in Houston on the coastal plain of the Gulf Coast, for more than three decades. He teaches literature and the environment courses at the University of Houston, and he writes frequently about urban nature and its place in American environmental literature. He is the editor of City Wilds (University of Georgia Press, 2002). j o h n e l d e r has lived in the Green Mountain village of Bristol since 1973, when he and his wife, Rita, finished graduate school and took up their teaching positions in Vermont. This heavily glaciated landscape, with the drama and beauty of its seasons, has become central to his teaching over the years. In his reading of literature and his writing as well, John has been stimulated by the ways in which human and natural history flow together in this state of towns embraced by unpeopled ridges, stone walls, and cellar holes amid thick forests. c h e r y l l g l o t f e l t y , a Montana native, hails from a family of Black Angus cattle ranchers, but she was deported from Big Sky country while still in diapers, destined to spend her formative years in Silicon Valley. She teaches in the literature and environment graduate program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Having coedited The Ecocriticism Reader and cofounded the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, she is now completing a literary anthology of Nevada. c o n t r i b u t o r s 2 3 7 e l l e n g o l d e y grew up in southwestern Ohio’s Miami Valley, where the rolling hills are textured with cornfields, cattle, and farm ponds. Her curiosity about the natural world began in youthful exploration of her family’s twenty-eight acres of pasture, pond, and woodlot. Now she resides with red clay–tinted shoes in the piedmont of South Carolina, where she is a professor of biology at Wofford College. She has twice been named Wofford’s Faculty Member of the Year. g r e g g o r d o n grew up along Colorado’s Front Range. The explosive growth and conversion of open space into starter mansions sent him to Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, where he resides among ponderosa pines, Clark’s nutcrackers, and weird rocks. He is currently building a straw bale house powered by solar and wind and trying to learn everything the landscape has to teach. His latest book, Landscape of Desire: Identity and Nature in Utah...