Christopher Cokinos is a nature-and-science writer with strong interests in a variety of topics, including climate change (especially geoengineering), extinction, traditional natural history, space sciences, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and improving science communications.
The winner of a Whiting Award, Christopher Cokinos is the author of two literary nonfiction books, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds and The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, both from Tarcher/Penguin.Hope Is the Thing with Feathers won the Glasgow Prize and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. For The Fallen Sky, he was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to participate in a meteorite-hunting expedition in Antarctica, and that book was a finalist for the Saroyan Prize.
His books have been featured and praised in such venues as "All Things Considered", People magazine, the Boston Globe, Nature, Science, Natural History, among others; His poems, reviews, aphorisms and essays have appeared widely in such publications as Poetry, Science, Birder World, Hotel Amerika, Orion, The New York Times and The American Scholar; His essays have won the John Burroughs natural-history essay prize and the FineLine Lyric Prose Prize from Mid-American Review
He contributes to both the Los Angeles Times and High Country News His current book project is a history of the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In May 2011 he left Utah State University, where he taught for nine years and founded and edited Isotope magazine, to join the MFA program and the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona, where he is an Associate Professor.
