Christopher Cokinos

Background

Christopher Cokinos was born on January 13, 1963 in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. He is a son of George Clinton Cokinos, a chemist, and Marjorie Cokinos, a nurse.

Education

In 1981 Christopher Cokinos received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University at Bloomington. In 1991 he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from Washington University in St. Louis.

Career

From 1991 to 1997 Christopher Cokinos was an instructor at Kansas State University, then a visiting assistant professor from 1997 to 2000, and an assistant professor of English from 2000 to 2002. He served as president of the Kansas Audubon Council from 1996 to 1998. In 1997 Cokinos was a co-founder of Sustainable Manhattan.

In 2002 he became an assistant professor of English and adjunct assistant professor of environment and society at Utah State University. In 2006 Christopher was a volunteer at Bear River Watershed Council. In May 2011 he left Utah State University, where he taught for nine years.

Achievements

• Christopher Cokinos is best known as the author of literary nonfiction: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, and Bodies, of the Holocene. He is the winner of a Whiting Award, the Fine-Line Prize for Lyric Prose, the Glasgow Prize, an American Antiquarian Society Artists Fellowship, the John Burroughs Prize for Best Nature Essay, 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.
  
  The poet Gabriel Gudding has selected Cokinos's collection The Underneath as winner of the 2016 New American Press Poetry Prize. His poetry, essays, reviews and criticism have appeared in such venues as TYPO, Diagram, Ecotone, Orion, Pacific Standard, The Writer’s Chronicle, Salon, Science and Extrapolation. He contributes semi-regularly to High Country News and the Los Angeles Times.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars

    (In this acclaimed volume, prizewinning poet and nature wr...)

    2009
  • Bodies, of the Holocene

    (In this brooding and daring collection of lyric prose set...)

    2013
  • The Underneath

    (In Christopher Cokinos' deliciously horrifying new book, ...)

    2018
  • Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds

    (A prizewinning poet and nature writer weaves together nat...)

    2000
  • The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide

    (A land of austerity and bounty, the Sonoran Desert is a p...)

    2016
  • Killing Seasons

    (This is a collection of poetry.)

    1993

Membership

Christopher Cokinos is a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Northern Flint Hills Audubon Society, Sustainable Manhattan.

Interests

• stargazing, backpacking, birding, hiking, visiting art museums, gardening

Connections

On May 14, 1988 Christopher Cokinos married Elizabeth Caroline Dodd. Currently, he lives with his partner, the writer Kathe Lison.

Father:

George Clinton Cokinos

Mother:

Marjorie Cokinos

ex-spouse:

Elizabeth Caroline Dodd

Partner:

Kathe Lison

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2000