Alison Townsend
Poet, Essayist, Teacher
"Tell me the landscape in which you live,
and I will tell you who you are.”
—José Ortega Y Gassett
About
Alison Townsend is a poet, essayist, and teacher who with her husband stewards four acres of prairie and oak savanna atop a drumlin in the farm country outside Madison, Wisconsin. Raised in rural Pennsylvania and New York State, educated in Vermont and California, she came of age on the West Coast and considers the liminal edge of America (especially Western Oregon) her spiritual home. Her experience of early motherloss precipitated a quest for belonging underpinned by a search for identify connected to the natural world—all themes that inform her work. She is fascinated with home, place, memory, and the roles that landscape and creativity play in shaping the self and the imagination.
She is the author of a memoir-in-essays, The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home (shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay); two books of poetry, Persephone in America (Crab Orchard Poetry Prize) and The Blue Dress (shortlisted for the Paterson Award); and a short prose volume, The Persistence of Rivers (Jeanne Leiby Prose Award, Florida Review/Burrow Press). Her third poetry collection, American Lonely, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books in 2026.
Her work appears in numerous journals, including About Place, Blackbird, Catamaran, The Kenyon Review, Parabola, The Southern Review and Under the Sun, and has been recognized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays 2020. Awards include a Wisconsin Arts Board Grant, the 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize, as well as residencies at Hedgebrook, VCCA, The Spring Creek Project, Dorland Mountain Arts, and other colonies.
She earned a B.A. at Marlboro College, an M.A. at Claremont Graduate University, and an M.F.A. at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. There she received the David Saunders Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities, and taught creative nonfiction, poetry, nature writing, and women’s life writing for fifteen years, following a decade in bookselling and private teaching.
Alison's Books
Coming in Late Spring 2026
Finalist, PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
An intimate praise-song for 'the kingdom of ordinary things'
Description
When Alison Townsend purchased her first house, in south-central Wisconsin, she put down roots where she never imagined settling. To understand how she came to live in the Midwest, she takes a journey through personal landscapes, considering the impact of geography at pivotal moments in her life, vividly illuminating the role of mourning, homesickness, and relocations.
With sparkling, lyrical prose, The Green Hour undulates effortlessly through time like a red-winged blackbird. Inspired by five beloved settings—eastern Pennsylvania, Vermont, California, western Oregon, and the spot atop the Wisconsin hill where she now resides—Townsend considers the role that place plays in shaping the self. She reveals the ways that a fresh perspective or new experience in any environment can incite wonder, build unexpected connections, and provide solace or salvation.
Mesmerizingly attentive to nature—its beauty, its fragility, and its redeeming powers—she asks what it means to live in community with wilderness and to allow our identities to be shaped by our interactions with it: our story as its story.
Reviews
"Truly a love song to wild, shining places. It is a lonely, lovely memoir of a life shaped by a mother's early death, a story from the time when the Earth still had the strength to save her children."—Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Earth's Wild Children
"In essays of breathtaking beauty and emotional honesty, The Green Hour explores the psychic costs of uprooting, and the healing to be found in connecting with the natural world. Townsend is a writer so attuned to the numinous that her lyrical prose seems to shimmer on the page. An unforgettable book."—Catherine Jagoe, author of Bloodroot
"I read The Green Hour outside, and every few sentences I looked up to see this familiar place through Townsend's eyes, every detail now infused with the 'proper attitude of wonder.' I suggest you take this book out with you into the world where all things are 'waiting to be noticed and seen.'"—Brenda Miller, author of An Earlier Life
"I enjoyed The Green Hour, for its prose and questing narrator, and for its evocation of landscapes and inner geography in these fine essays of loss, love, and healing."—Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of the Imagination
“An inherently fascinating, informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking read throughout, The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home showcases author Alison Townsend's enviable skills as an observant storyteller. The result is a book that will linger in the mind and memory of the reader long after it has been finished and set back upon the shelf.”—Midwest Book Review
"A powerful narrative, steeped in emotion, healing, and vulnerability, one that resonates with a wide readership. Townsend’s story is needed more than ever. . . . In accessible and poetic prose, Townsend appeals to a general audience. She engages her readers into becoming citizen environmental scientists and humanists. It is a call for slowing down and steeping oneself in contemplation in this accelerated and highly contested stage of the Anthropocene."—
H-Environment
"[Wisconsin's] thriving natural paradise is on full display not just on the cover of Alison Townsend’s gorgeous new memoir, The Green Hour, but also in the author’s lush, lyrical words. . . . This is a nature memoir, a love letter to the land and an exploration of what it means to put down roots. Don’t miss it."—Madison Magazine
“No lines are wasted, and every sentence contains wondrous details of the natural world. . . . This book is a conversation with the places Townsend inhabits and one that fully draws the reader in with precise and detailed descriptions. Long meditative passages describing the land capture the beauty and mystery of the natural world. Each sentence contains images that bring the reader deeper and deeper into Townsend’s environment.”—Hippocampus Magazine
“Both a tale of homecoming and a travel narrative, shared through heartfelt missives from the author’s memory and life. . . . Green imagery vines through the collection. . . . The Green Hour beautifully celebrates our human relationships with the natural world.”
— Wisconsin People & Ideas
Crab Orchard Poetry Series--Open Competition Winner
Description
In Persephone in America, Alison Townsend deftly weaves autobiography with myth in this reinvention of the tale of Demeter and Persephone as seen from the modern woman’s perspective. Fraught with emotional honesty, this captivating collection of lyrical and narrative poems chronicles the struggles of the figurative Persephone in three parts—the abduction, descent to the underworld, and return. Townsend turns a shrewd eye to her own experiences, as well as to the lives of other women, to offer an unflinching yet deeply compassionate exploration of such themes as girlhood and the vulnerability of the motherless; the demons of depression, addiction, and abuse; as well as passion, aging, and celebration of the natural world.
Although the poems traverse dark emotional territory at times, the picture that emerges ultimately is one of revelation and wisdom. Persephone in America is above all a journey of the soul, following the narrator as she explores what it means to be a woman in America, at times descending into darkness, only to emerge into redemption and realize “time’s sweet and invincible secret—that everything repeats—and we watch it.” Townsend’s candid portrait of female loss and discovery seeks to illuminate the truths inherent in myth, and the awakenings that hide in our darkest moments.
Reviews
“By constructing a new mythos about America’s life and soul, Alison Townsend portrays a renewal so abundant it becomes harder to renounce than embrace. Here, even the steps of a mini-skirted girl in a shopping mall resonate with ‘the great and ordinary mystery of being mortal.’ These poems are expansive yet tightly focused; unsentimental yet verdant. They make you want to live the mystery.”—Sue William Silverman, author of Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You
“Through the lens-metaphor of Persephone’s story, Alison Townsend illuminates the passages, descents, losses and insights hard-won by herself and also by young women she has mentored, women who have made descents of their own into underworlds offered up by contemporary culture. Her poems are generous in their candor and compassion, stunningly written, fierce, and consoling.”—Leslie Ullman, author of Slow Work through Sand
“Persephone in America is a magnificent book. Alison Townsend poignantly and sometimes shockingly blends reimagined myth with reinvented autobiography. Persephone, the abducted daughter of a goddess, is a would-be Barbie, a wild one, a flirt, an innocent, a rape victim, a cutter, a bulimic, a young poet, a girl who misses her mother, an artist’s model, a girl who loves to dance, a depressive, a married woman who has an abortion, and more. . . . Townsend comes at the ancient archetype from so many angles, all of them glittering with line-by-line, phrase-by-phrase richness and insight. This is what revisionist mythology is all about: the sacred and the demonic still alive in our time.”—Alicia Ostriker, author of No Heaven
“Alison Townsend’s Persephone in America is a collection of confidence and authority, a book that does not shirk from the difficult agendas it sets for itself. Townsend—both through her striking Persephone series and her quietly affecting autobiographical narratives—seeks to make sense of the difficulties of grace and renewal. Loss and mourning haunt these poems, but they also arrive at the long perspectives which can attend our middle years. James Wright famously sought to write ‘the poems of a grown man.’ Townsend’s poems are surely—and in places triumphantly—the poems of a grown woman. This book is a very fine achievement indeed.”—David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004
Selected for Marie Alexander Prose Poem Series
Shortlisted for the Paterson Poetry Prize
This is an utterly beautiful book. I don’t know how to say it better than that. Townsend takes the memories of her life—losses, victories, the treasures and the thrown away—and renders them into unforgettable and lasting art.
— Vince Gotera, North American Review
The Blue Dress is a quietly ambitious collection of verse and prose that, through a series of declarative gestures, sculpts the distant and not so distant past into a delicate though decidedly unsentimental shape. One of Townsend’s strengths as a storyteller is her ability to dramatize the depths of honest feeling while entirely avoiding sentimental or melodramatic methods of manipulation. The poems in The Blue Dress demonstrate her unwavering dedication to the vast field of ordinary moments that constitute the emotional landscape of our lives.
— Tony Leuzzi, Double Room
The Blue Dress is filled with a capacious, multi-faceted, and above all, physical knowledge. That the life of the body is both our vulnerability and our salvation is a wisdom running throughout these poems’ hard-won, bravery rendered record of losses and loves.
— Jane Hirshfield
The project of Alison Townsend’s poetry is to chart a course through the deepest of losses—to attempt some safe passage through a lifetime’s erasures. Intimate, warm, and observant, this book involves us in the inscription of a life.
— Mark Doty
Alison Townsend’s articulation of sorrows has always cast an aura, of beauty, and deepest, truest instruction. I’ve always, instinctively, moved toward it, have always missed it when it was absent. Delicate pieces of memory, mood, and self—self examining itself—of hope and despair, of crystalline light shining through ‘grief solid as a rock,’ the seemingly unsayable grief of a mother’s death… in The Blue Dress, Alison Townsend says it.
— Sharon Doubiago
Winner of the Florida Review's Jeanne Leiby Award
Alison Townsend shapes the memories within this book like the meditative and meandering rivers that inspired them. The Persistence of Rivers evokes the naturalism of Thoreau and Dillard, yet Townsend’s prose remains masterfully singular in its subject, lyricism, and poignancy. Spanning decades from the 1950s to the present, the book considers the impact of rivers at pivotal moments in Townsend’s life, examining issues of landscape, loss, memory, healing, and the search for home.
''I was enthralled… The Persistence of Rivers is sensual and luminous as the bodies of water that Alison Townsend brings so sharply into focus throughout.'' — Vanessa Blakeslee, Contest Judge
Alison's Chapbooks
Winner of Flume Press Poetry Chapbook Competition
Open to any page of this book and you'll find a little miracle-in-progress—an apparition in sidewalk chalk, a re-animation of myth, a new spin on an old tune. In Alison Townsend's poems, all of the lost ones come home, in one form or another, to remind us that "everything repeats, and we watch it." And Still the Music is a brave and expansive collection; each of its beautifully crafted poems is bound to spark an instant recognition or trip a deeply hidden nerve. Yet in response to every old grief, Townsend offers another marvel, another song set to the steady beat of hope.”
—Pamela Gemin, Vendettas, Charms, and Prayers
I was immediately engaged by the arresting voice, the rush of vivid language, the integrity of this collection. These poems are fully realized, nothing tentative or unfinished about them. They triumph, even in the face of violence and loss.
—Carole Simmons Oles, Waking Stone
“These are expansive poems, as generous in scope as Walt Whitman's and as intimately particular as Eavan Boland's. Townsend deftly weaves contemporary story and ancient myth into a brilliantly-hued tapestry that illuminates our lives.”
— Judith Sornberger, Open Heart
Contact me if you are interested in purchasing this book.
Parallel Press Chapbook Series
Rolling and dancing in mud, a child discovers an ecstasy of connection, a "moment of pure light/when I was the land…" So Townsend launches an exploration of "the truth of the body," drawing clear lines of distinction between the liberating intuitions of the body elemental and the cramping coercions of the body social. Several poems are rooted in the nitty-gritty of familiar female experience with its perpetual "struggling to fit even/when the fit cinched me…" Through this voice, vivid with narrative detail and perception, we encounter girls embarking on sexual initiation and experimentation, young women shadowed by abuse, mature women mourning the failure of intimacy.
A second voice, lighter and more lyrical, records the speaker's insights (even revelations) as she begins to unlearn convention and invokes her own internal compass. "I am inviting back the one/who has been away,…/calling out to her,/the way a psychic calls her soul/back to her body,…/I am requesting that she teach me/to remember…/I call her home to me." This newly trusted self deserves clothes from Victoria's Secret, "no matter [that]…/I'll never look like these women." Her face "becomes more my own each day…"
And sexuality and connection regain their promise. With a delicate grace of image and language, Townsend proposes: "If I called you river.../If you called me river.../If you were water entering water…/If the river knew anything more/than this sweet braiding and undoing of water,/that feeds everything/and yearns for everything and is,/in its rushing, everything the river can know." Centering herself thus in what the body knows, Townsend finds homecoming.— Good Reads
Writing and Media
This section is under construction. Please check back for more links to my poetry and essays. In the meantime, enjoy the links below to readings, interviews, and samples of writing.
Readings and Interviews
The Spirit Of Place: Cole Erickson interviews Alison Townsend on WORT's Madison BookBeat
Wisconsin Book Festival Virtual Book Launch for The Green Hour: Alison Townsend in Conversation with Catherine Jagoe
Alison Townsend, author of The Green Hour, and James Bohnen, of Arcadia Books, in conversation
The Green Hour: Alison Townsend in Conversation with Marilyn Annucci, Mystery to Me Bookstore
Writing It Real Interview: Alison in Conversation with Sheila Bender on The Green Hour
Rattle Magazine Rattlecast: Rattle Poetry Prize
Radio Interview with Sheila Bender on KPTZ’s “In Conversation: Discussions on the Writing Life”
Poems and Essays
"Say the Words," Crab Orchard Review, Fall 2025/Winter 2026
"Our Lady of Midwinter," Sheila-Na- Gig, Winter 2025
"Northern Red Oak: Mercy" and "Northern Red Oak: A Book of Hours," About Place, 2023
After Watching the Zoom Presentation on the Trees," Plant-Human Quarterly, 2022
"Pantoum from the Window of the Room Where I Write," Rattle Poetry Prize, 2021
"My Pink Lake and Other Digressions," Best American Essays 2020
Read excerpt from The Persistence of Rivers, 2017
"My Thoreau Summer," Under The Sun, 2015
"The Favorite," Pushcart Prize XXXIV, 2010
"What I Never Told You About the Abortion, Best American Poetry, 2006