About Our Editors

  
Terrain.org is comprised of two editorial bodies: editors, who assemble each issue and maintain Terrain.org as an organization, and our Editorial Board, comprised of leaders in the literary and environmental arena from across the U.S., who serve in an advisory capacity.

Editors

• Simmons B. Buntin, Editor and Publisher
• Catherine Cunningham, Editor

Editorial Board

• Scott Calhoun
• Miriam Marty Clark
• Rick Cole
• Carolyn Dooling
• Deborah Fries
• Jessie Lendennie
• Rich Michal
• David Rothenberg
• Lauret Savoy
• David Wann
• Todd Ziebarth
    

Editors

Simmons B. Buntin
Editor and Publisher

Though Simmons Buntin’s terrain has varied from the scrub oak hammocks of central Florida to the thorny scarps of the Sonoran Desert, his path seems always directed by the pursuit of an eloquent balance between the built and natural environments. He has published poetry, essays, and technical articles in publications as varied as Southern Humanities Review, South Dakota Review, Mid-American Review, Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society, and Orion, and writes a regular online editorial for Next American City magazine. He has a master's degree in urban and regional planning, concluded by an award-winning thesis on sustainable suburban downtown redevelopment. Simmons transitioned from energy services program manager for the U.S. Department of Energy to web program manager for the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management, and lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Simmons readily admits that poetry and prose—the written or spoken word, the interplay of slight magic in the relationships of those things around and within us—must be at the heart of any successful, livable place. Composing the words is a brilliantly frustrating task, involving intricate details and entire communities. But it is the vital structure of our terrain, the stability and the change we need to survive. And to thrive.

He has won an Academy of American Poets Prize, Colorado Artist's Fellowship for Poetry, and Tucson-Pima Arts Council grant. His first book of poetry, Riverfall, was published in May 2005 by Ireland's Salmon Publishing. Catch up with him at www.SimmonsBuntin.com.

Simmons writes "The Literal Landscape" column for Terrain.org.

Catherine Cunningham
Editor

Diversity in experience and interests aptly describes Catherine Cunningham. Cathy hails from a family farm in South Dakota where she learned the essence of cows-n-cookin’. Perhaps it was the farming lifestyle, where one plays the role of horticulturalist, planner, veterinarian, microbiologist, geneticist, engineer, construction worker, accountant, and meteorologist, that inspired her appetite for variety in understanding the world. From those ambitions, she earned a bachelor’s degree in animal science and has pursued graduate work in industrial hygiene and environmental sciences.

Cathy’s work experience at Western Area Power Administration includes occupational safety and health, training and performance consulting, project manager for Environmental Management Systems, and her current position as NEPA project manager. She has also achieved personal and professional accomplishment in consulting, fundraising for charitable organizations, and developing partnerships among public, private, and tribal entities for communications technologies and community development. Cathy served on the planning and zoning commission in her Colorado mountain hometown. Mother of a 3-year old, she also enjoys traveling, skiing, bicycling, hiking, flyfishing, drawing, painting, and pottery.

Editorial Board

Scott Calhoun

A self-described “desert plant fiend,” Scott Calhoun enjoys exploring the deserts of Arizona and Mexico seeking interesting plants, gardens, and transcendent fish tacos. He gets much of his design inspiration from badlands and taco stands, a style which Sunset magazine dubbed “Taqueria Chic.” Scott writes, lectures, and designs gardens in Tucson, Arizona. His first book, Yard Full of Sun: The Story of a Gardener's Obsession that Got a Little Out of Hand, has been awarded the 2006 American Horticultural Society Book Award. His newest book is Chasing Wildflowers: A Mad Search for Wild Gardens. Catch up with Scott at www.zonagardens.com.

Miriam Marty Clark

Miriam Marty Clark is an Associate Professor of English at Auburn University in Alabama. A native Midwesterner, she has lived in the small-town South for more than twenty years. She teaches courses in American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has a special interest in American poetry from Whitman and Emerson to the present. She has published essays on a number of twentieth century writers including poets A. R. Ammons and Howard Nemerov and short story writers Alice Munro, William Trevor, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Grace Paley. She has also published poems. 

At present she is working on a book about the twentieth-century American philosopher and rhetorician Kenneth Burke and his influential friendships with several American poets including John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Howard Nemerov, and A. R. Ammons. Along with Burke's writings, many of which address the relationship between nature and human action in culture and technology, she is studying his extensive correspondence with poets and critics.

Miriam is married to Drew Clark, who teaches Renaissance literature at Auburn. They have two daughters.

Rick Cole

Rick Cole is the City Manager of Ventura, California, a coastal community recognized as one of "America's Most Livable Cities." The Los Angeles Times recently profiled him as "one of the nation's best known advocates of 'smart growth.'"

Rick previously served as City Manager of Azusa, California (1998-2004) and Southern California Director of the Local Government Commission, where his outspoken advocacy for "smart growth" and "livable communities" reached a national audience. During twelve years of elected service on the Pasadena City Council (including two years as mayor), he spearheaded the rebirth of Old Pasadena, a commitment to rail transit, and an award-winning General Plan effort that involved more than 3,500 citizens.

Carolyn Dooling

Carolyn Dooling is a real estate marketing consultant, spending ten years previously working as an urban planner. She received her Master of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Colorado at Denver in 1997 and went on to practice in both the public and private sector. Carolyn has spent the last few years focusing on her passion for sustainability and the built environment by planning sustainability events and conferences, such as the Colorado Urban Green Conference, an annual event hosted by the Urban Land Institute, American Institute of Architects, and the CU College of Architecture and Planning. She is a LEED AP, co-chair of the ULI Sustainable Communities Committee, head of communications for the LEED ND Interest Group, and is active with the USGBC Colorado Chapter. In her spare time, Carolyn pursues her interests in textiles and interior design. She can often be seen riding her bike around with her two children and husband in Stapleton, a New Urbanist community in Denver where they currently live.

Deborah Fries

Deborah Fries is a writer and government public affairs professional, and the current Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Her first book of poetry, Various Modes of Departure, was the recipient of the 2003 Kore Press First Book Award. Her poems and poetry reviews have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Cream City Review, North American Review, Cimmaron Review, Valparaiso Review and Terrain.org, where she has been a contributor since 2000. She works in multiple genres—including short fiction, essays, and non-fiction—and teaches writing workshops in the Philadelphia area.

For more than 20 years, she has earned a living through the written word—as a teacher, journalist, freelance writer, and public involvement professional. After 13 years in transportation public affairs, she traded highways for riparian buffers, shifting her focus to environmental protection. Committed to communicating with images as well as words, she studies and practices non-toxic printmaking.

Deborah writes the "Plein Air" column for Terrain.org.

Jessie Lendennie

Jessie Lendennie is a poet and publisher. Born in Arkansas, she lived in California and New York City before leaving the States for London, England, in 1970. She obtained a BA honours degree in Philosophy at Kings College, London, and a post-graduate degree in education from the Roehampton Institute, London. She began to publish her poetry in England during the 1970s, and in 1981, she moved to Galway, County Galway, Ireland, where she was a founder member of the Galway Writing Workshop, and founding editor of the journal The Salmon. The journal led to book publishing, and in 1984 Salmon Publishing was established. Since 1986 she has run the press as its editor and managing director, commissioning, editing, and publishing over 250 books of poetry and prose. Many of these books were first collections from Irish women poets—a ground-breaking move in Irish poetry. Her own poetry explores the relationship between landscape and human ideals. Her published essays include "Holy Ground" (published in Irish Spirit, Wolfhound Press, 2001), an exploration of the spiritual dilemmas inherent in Ireland's phenomenal growth and development over the last 15 years, and "Poets of the Burren" (The Book of the Burren, Tir Eolas Press, new edition 2002), on poets who have been influenced by the unique, desolate, limestone landscape of North County Clare, Ireland.

She has given numerous workshops, lectures, and writing courses in Ireland and abroad, including Yale University, University of Maryland, Marshall University, University of Alaska in Anchorage, University of Southern Illinois, Trinity College in Dublin, National University of Ireland, Rutgers University, University of Arkansas, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has read her poetry at dozens of venues in North America and Europe. In 1998 she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Jessie runs Salmon Poetry from a house on a hill verlooking the Atlantic, half a mile from the fabulous Cliffs of Moher in Co. Clare, Ireland.

Rich Michal

Rich Michal is a graduate of the Purdue University School of Engineering with a BS in construction management and engineering as well as the Indiana University School of Business with an MBA in Finance. He also holds bachelors and masters degrees in architecture from the University of Arizona College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, where he now serves as adjunct lecturer in solar utilization, environmental control systems, and computer energy modeling.

Rich has over 17 years of professional experience, including seven years as an expert engineering witness, policy analyst, and consumer advocate in the regulated natural gas utility industry, and ten years in the residential, commercial, and industrial construction industry. He is a LEED-accredited design professional and has published and presented papers and conducted workshops on sustainable architecture in the U.S., Mexico, Ireland, and Great Britain.  He has also worked as a consultant on sustainable projects in the U.S. and Nigeria. Rich is currently director of project development for Adolfson & Peterson Construction—the largest green building commercial contractor in Arizona—and is the principal in charge of opening an office for the company in Tucson. Rich, his wife, and three daughters live in the passive solar, rammed-earth home that he designed and built as part of his master’s thesis.

David Rothenberg

Philosopher and musician David Rothenberg is the author of Sudden Music: Improvisation, Art, Nature (Georgia, 2002), Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes (Codhill Press, 2001), Hand's End: Technology and the Limits of Nature (California, 1993), Always the Mountains (Georgia, 2003), and Why Birds Sing (Basic, 2005), currently being translated into five languages and being developed into a TV series for the BBC. His articles have appeared in Parabola, Orion, The Nation, Wired, Dwell, Kyoto Journal, and Sierra.

David is also a composer and jazz clarinetist, and he has six CDs out under his own name. His second record, On the Cliffs of the Heart, with percussionist Glen Velez and banjo player Graeme Boone, was named it one of the top ten releases of 1995 by Jazziz magazine. In 2000 Before the War was released, a collaboration with natural sound artist Douglas Quin. The Guardian in Britain praised it as “genuine 21st century music.” Rothenberg is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

David writes the "Bull Hill" column for Terrain.org.

Lauret Savoy

Lauret Savoy writes across threads of cultural identity to explore their
shaping by relationship with, and dislocation from, the land.  Her goal
is to produce multiple narratives of such connections and edges from
stories we tell of land, its origin and history, to stories we tell of
ourselves in the land and of relational identity.  She is a woman of
mixed African-American, Euro-American, and Native-American heritage, a
photographer, pilot, and professor of geology and environmental studies
at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. 

She co-edited with Alison Deming The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed Editions 2002, expanded edition to be released in 2009). She is the lead editor of Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology (Trinity University Press, 2006, under poet-publisher Barbara Ras), with Eldridge and Judy Moores.  She also co-authored and edited Living with the Changing California Coast (with Gary Griggs and Kiki Patsch, University of California Press, 2005).  Her essays have appeared in anthologies and journals such as Orion and Ecotone.

Lauret will write a new column for Terrain.org beginning with our next issue.

David Wann

David Wann is president of the Sustainable Futures Society, a board member of the Cohousing Association of the U.S., and a fellow of the Simplicity Forum. He has now written or edited nine books, more than two hundred articles, and has produced twenty videos and TV programs about sustainable lifestyles, policies, and designs. Books include Log Rhythms (1984) Biologic: Designing With Nature to Protect the Environment (1994), Deep Design: Pathways to a Livable Future (1996), Affluenza (2001) The Zen of Gardening in the High and Arid West (2003) Superbia! 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods (2003), Reinventing Communities: Stories From the Walkways of Cohousing (2005) and Simple Prosperity: Finding Real Wealth in a Sustainable Lifestyle (2007). Films include Sustaining America’s Agriculture, narrated by Raymond Burr, Building Livable Communities, produced for then-VP Al Gore’s office, and Designing a Great Neighborhood, now airing on Free Speech TV and Lime TV. Visit his website at www.DaveWann.com.

David has presented keynote talks and workshops at many conferences and college events, and loves to see the “lights come on” as he talks about creating a better, more sustainable future. He’s taught at the college level, worked more than a decade as a policy analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and helped design/build the cohousing village he now lives in, to bring his sustainable vision down to Earth.

Todd Ziebarth

Todd Ziebarth is a policy analyst with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. What is he doing as an editor of this journal? Well, along with academic training in policy analysis, he also received training in urban and regional planning. In addition, he worked as a city planner for over two years in small-town Colorado, and maintains a strong interest in exploring many questions about our relationship to the built and natural environments.

For more information, please contact us.