A Habit of Landscape celebrates the convergent meanings of habit and habitat. each sharing the words “to dwell.”  These poems hold sensate moments—family experiences, inner revelations, transformative places.  A realized kinship between the human and natural worlds signals the inclusiveness of place.  Not something “out there,” this shared space—personal or global– often surprises in the poem’s turn.  Like flash narratives these poems contain worlds in the vibrating fabric of the instant— forgotten, dismissed, previously unseen.  Whether an elegy for a brother, an encounter with a pronghorn, or the whispers surrounding adoption, these lyric pieces speak to the sacrality of the moment.

Shelley Armitage, professor, writer, naturalist, conservationist lives in the Chihuahuan desert in Las Cruces, New Mexico.  She is author of eight award-winning books, most recently Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place, a Kirkus starred book cited as one of the best memoirs of the year, and a finalist for the May Sarton prize, the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and the Collins P. Carr award from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Her work has been featured on NPR and among her other honors are a Wurlitzer Foundation fellowship, a Distinguished Chair in American Literature Fulbright in Warsaw, Fulbright awards in Finland and Portugal, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, three National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, and a Rockefeller grant.

Armitage is professor emerita at the University of Texas at El Paso where she held the Roderick Professorship and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.  She manages the family grasslands near Vega, Texas—inspiration for how landscape may draw us into a greater understanding of ourselves and others as we experience kinship with the places we inhabit.

Her poem “Friendship” first appeared in Texas Poetry Assignment.

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