Christopher Cokinos is a Professor of English at the University of Arizona, where he teaches creative writing and science fiction and serves as a mentor in the Carson Scholars Program in science communication. He is the author of the literary nonfiction books The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars and Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, both from Tarcher/Penguin, as well as Bodies, of the Holocene, a lyric prose collection in Truman State University Press’s Contemporary Nonfiction Series. His poetry chapbook, Held as Earth, is out from Finishing Line Press, as is his collection The Underneath, winner of the New American Press Poetry Prize. With Eric Magrane, he has co-edited an anthology of contemporary nature writing called The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide, winner of a Southwest Book Award and published by the University of Arizona Press. With Julie Swarstad Johnson, he is co-editor of Beyond Earth's Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight, also from the University of Arizona Press.
His work has been praised or featured in such venues as The Chicago Tribune, Mid-American Review, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, Nature, Science, Natural History, All Things Considered, and People magazine. His poems, aphorisms, reviews, criticism, microfiction, articles and essays have appeared in december, Sky & Telescope, The Chariton Review, Mudlark, Western Humanities Review, Analog, Berkeley Poetry Review, POETRY, Pank, Hotel Amerika, The Volta, High Desert Journal, Scientific American, Foundation, Extrapolation, Science, Orion, terrain.org, The New York Times, and The American Scholar, among other venues. Cokinos contributes essays semi-regularly to the Los Angeles Times.
He is the winner of a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, the Fine-Line Prize for Lyric Prose, the Glasgow Prize, an American Antiquarian Society Artists Fellowship, the John Burroughs Prize for Best Nature Essay (in 2007), a National Science Foundation Antarctic Visiting Artist and Writer Fellowship and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. He’s been a semi-finalist for the Saroyan Prize and a finalist for the Utah Book Award. In 2017 he was a fellow at the Rachel Carson Institute for Environment and Society in Munich.
His research has taken him from a rocket-engine test to a stint as a crew journalist at the Mars Desert Research Station, from 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle to the South Pole. He founded and edited Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature & Science Writing at Utah State University from 2003 to 2010. The magazine won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
He continues to write poetry and is at work on a nonfiction book about the Moon. Cokinos divides his time between Tucson and Logan Canyon, Utah.
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Hope Is the Thing with FeathersA Personal Chronicle of Vanished BirdsFrom"The Dark Beneath Their Wings"
In a volume of his American Ornithology, pioneering naturalist Alexander Wilson described a flock of Passenger Pigeons that he had witnessed in the early 1800s as the birds flew between Kentucky and Indiana. The flock, Wilson estimated, numbered 2,230,272,000 birds. “An almost inconceivable multitude,” he wrote, “and yet probably far below the actual amount.” The multitude spanned a mile wide and extended for some 240 miles, consisting of no fewer than three pigeons per cubic yard of sky… if Wilson’s flock had flown beak to tail in a single file the birds would have stretched around the earth’s equatorial circumference 22.6 times… With their powerful chests and long, quick-snapping wings, the pigeons flew an average of 60 miles per hour for hours at a time. Sometimes the swift and seemingly endless flocks stretched across the entire dome of sky, so that wherever one looked, horizon or zenith or somewhere between, there flew the pigeons. They closed over the sky like an eyelid.
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers:A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds -
The Fallen SkyAn Intimate History of Shooting Stars
On any clear night, under a dark enough sky, we can see shooting stars. We wish upon them, even if we don’t quite know what they are—of course they’re not really stars—and even if we don’t know where they come from or what they might tell us about the universe. It’s as if we’re eager to pin our chances on something strange and sudden, something beautiful beyond our ken. Across cultures and time, we have written ourselves into the sky. We create constellations, transforming the random spatter of stars into shapes and stories. We name planets after gods. And we associate meteors and meteorites—the light of dust or rocks burning passage through the air, and the stones, after such fire, that sometimes fall to Earth—with the most elemental aspects of our lives: good luck, ill fortune, and even death.
The Fallen Sky:An Intimate History of Shooting Stars -
Bodies, of the HoloceneEssaysFrom"Pollen"
And so I sing to you.
I sing how we are pollen walking.
I sing April, I sing summer and late September, I sing the sex of flowers and trees that lands on our cotton shirts and summer dresses, on our skin and hair, and how we breathe them in, the beautiful provocations: the lanky engineer, the new med student. I sing the lazuli bunting, thimbleberry and columbine. I sing the growing slickness of your skin. I sing marmot, mountain nine bark and lupine. Spheres and folds, spikes and creases, stem and root.
I sing how syllables are songs, stories, too, for the deep beginnings of the word pollen, and I love this, mean “dust” and “meal.”
What we become, what we need along the way.
Bodies, of the Holocene:Essays
"Cokinos guides the reader along his search for the driving force behind the passions of meteorite scientists, collectors, and dealers that make the meteoritic community such a vibrant and contentious bunch. It is a journey well worth taking." —Science magazine [on The Fallen Sky]
"A marvelous book, beautifully written and filled with a poetry of evocative detail." —The Philadelphia Inquirer [on Hope Is the Thing With Feathers]
"Eloquent and moving . . . a charming narrative that is both personal and historically meticulous." —The Washington Post Book World [on Hope Is the Thing With Feathers]
"Resounds with excitement." —The Boston Globe [on Hope Is the Thing With Feathers]
“Cokinos turns a scientist’s minute eye on the artifacts of human experience. Page by page, he lovingly and ruthlessly gazes—at stars, trees, birds, words, sex, loss, hope—until the object of his gaze yields up its tiny constituent parts. How fitting that such a project should find its voice in the form of these micro-essays, each one dense and particulated as soil, requiring from us a readerly carefulness that involves us in Cokinos’s own work of close study.” —Kimberly Johnson, author of A Metaphorical God [on Bodies, of the Holocene]
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