Christopher Cokinos directs the creative writing MFA program at the University of Arizona. He is the author of 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 a lyric essay collection, Bodies, of the Holocene, and a poetry chapbook, Held as Earth. With Eric Magrane, he coedited an anthology of contemporary nature writing, A Literary Field Guide to the Sonoran Desert, forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in 2016. He is currently an environmental policy fellow at the Udall Center.