Christopher Cokinos

Christopher Cokinos is an American poet and writer of nonfiction on nature and the environment.

Born in 1963 in Indianapolis, Indiana, he studied at Indiana University at Bloomington (BA 1981) and at Washington University in St. Louis (MFA 1991). He taught at Kansas State University from 1991-2002. He also served as president of the Kansas Audubon Council from 1996-98.

He is now an associate professor of English at Utah State University and founding editor of Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing.

In 2003, he was one of 10 national recipients of the Whiting Writers' Award, given annually to emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise. He is also the winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Fine-Line Prize for Lyric Prose (from Mid-American Review), and the Glasgow Prize for an Emerging Writing of Nonfiction.

Cokinos is the winner of fellowships and grants from the American Antiquarian Society, the Utah Arts Council, and the National Science Foundation. In 2003-2004 he was a member of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites expedition for five weeks, as part of his research for The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars.

His essays, poems and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, High Country News, Ecotone, Orion, Poetry, Western Humanities Review, and Science, among many other venues.

Cokinos lives with his partner, the writer Kathe Lison, by the Blacksmith Fork River in northern Utah's Cache Valley. He is a board member of the Bridgerland Audubon Society and HawkWatch International.

Books

• Killing Seasons , poetry (Topeka: Woodley Press, 1993).
• Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, nonfiction (New York: Tarcher, 2000; Warner, 2001; Tarcher/Penguin, 2009, revised.)
• "The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars", (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2009).

Sources

Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2007. PEN (Permanent Entry Number): 0000134622.

External links

• Isotope magazine website
• "Christopher Cokinos" author website
• "Prozac for the Planet: Can geoengineering make the climate happy? by Christopher Cokinos, American Scholar, Autumn 2010

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Name	Cokinos, Christopher
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Date of birth	1963
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