Last updated: April 1, 2023
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Adelheid Fischer
Writing Residency 2023
Adelheid Fischer is a literary nonfiction writer who focuses on natural history, ecology and the intersections of nature and culture. Her poems, essays and articles have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Utne Reader, Orion, Conservation, Places and Arizona Highways. She is 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, she coauthored North Shore: A Natural History of Minnesota’s Superior Coast. A selection of her natural history columns for the online publication Zygote Quarterly appeared in the 2017 book Science of Seeing. She is 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 her work as an educator at Arizona State University where she has pioneered curricula and special projects in biomimicry that introduce students to the use of biology as a means of sustainable innovation in architecture, design, business and engineering.
Fischer divides her time between the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona and South Mountain in the City of Phoenix, where she shares her yard, and sometimes her house, with scorpions, southern house spiders, hummingbirds, nighthawks, coyotes, cactus wrens, screech owls and the occasional javelina.
Visit her website.