During the month of April, Lo Que Pasa is highlighting the Regents' Professors, University Distinguished Professor and University Distinguished Outreach Faculty who were honored during the recent Pillars of Excellence Ceremony.

Alison Hawthorne Deming, Regents' Professor of English, is known to her students as an enthusiastic and caring teacher. And as a writer, she's known for her ability to connect her readers to nature, no matter how urban their lives are.

Deming, a poet and literary essayist, is also the Agnese Nelms Haury Chair of Environment and Social Justice and an affiliate faculty member in the Institute of the Environment. The Haury support allowed Deming to start a field studies writing program on Grand Manan Island in Canada, in which UA students help local high school students document life on the island.

Deming has written four nonfiction books, her most recent being "Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit." Deming, a former director of the UA Poetry Center, has also released several books of poetry, including "Stairway to Heaven." She also has collaborated with photographer Stephen Strom, a renowned professor of astrophysics who taught at Harvard and later worked at Kitt Peak National Observatory, on "Death Valley: Painted Light," published by the University of Arizona Press in 2016.

Deming, a recent Guggenheim Fellow, has received numerous awards for her work, including a Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Pushcart Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Bayer Award in science writing from Creative Nonfiction magazine, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship and a Wallace Stegner fellowship from Stanford University.

"I'm trying to find a truth, I'm trying to find a deeper understanding," Deming says. "I'm trying to find a deeper way to reflect the complexity of emotion that we feel about nature."

Learn more about Deming in the video below.