Eleanor Swanson
is a widely published poet and fiction writer who holds a PhD from the University of Denver. As a professor in the Regis University English Department, she focused on teaching environmental literature and the literature of social justice and social change. Numerous selections of her poems have been featured twice in The Missouri Review. Her work has appeared in the Southern Review, Black Warrior Review, the Denver Quarterly, the Bloomsbury Review, the American Poetry Journal, and in many other notable publications.
Awards include an NEA Fellowship and a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship. She was recently a featured speaker at the University of Denver’s Women’s Library Association, and has been a featured workshop leader, visiting writer, or featured poetry reader throughout the United States. She is a member of Associated Writing Programs (AWP), Columbine Poets, and Association for Studies of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. Her fiction and poetry have won first place awards in numerous competitions. Her first poetry collection, A Thousand Bonds: Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium, won the Ruth Stevens Award (NFSP Press) and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and her second collection of poetry, Trembling in the Bones—about the Colorado Coal strike of 1913 and the 1914 Ludlow Massacre—was reissued in 2013 ( 3: A Taos Press). Her third poetry collection is Memory’s Rooms (Conundrum Press). Her fourth poetry collection, Non Finito, was recently released by Fernwood Press. She is also a fiction writer who has published a novel and two collections of short stories. Her second collection, Exiles and Expatriates, won the Press Americana Prize.
She has volunteered for nonprofit agencies since the 1980s, including being a Big Sister since 1990. She has tutored homeless children and mentored incarcerated men at the Colorado Sterling Correctional Facility, and has volunteered for a decade as a Client Advocate at the Jefferson County Action Center, where she still volunteers. The Action Center serves 500,000 residents of the county with a clothing and food bank. Clients are also able to receive household and personal items, and assistance with rent and utilities.
As noted, she regularly reads from her work in the Denver Metro area and regionally, frequently as a featured or invited reader. She is currently working on a short story collection, and has completed a chapbook now under consideration by publishers, The Songs and Divinations of Raven, as well as a full length poetry collection: Cartographies.