About

Douglas Haynes is a nonfiction writer, poet, and teacher. His latest book, Teaching Toward Slow Hope: Place-Based Learning in College and Beyond, traces how students and educators across the Upper Midwest are remaking college into a place for connection, meaning, and collective resilience. His 2017 nonfiction book Every Day We Live Is the Future: Surviving in a City of Disasters is a cautionary tale of urban inequality and the climate crisis that recounts two Nicaraguan families’ quests to reinvent their lives in Managua, one of the world’s most disaster-prone cities. Douglas’s essays and journalism have appeared in Orion, Longreads, Michigan Quarterly Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Progressive, Civil Eats,  Boston Review, North American Review and dozens of other publications. He is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Last Word.

Douglas grew up in Iowa and Illinois and studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He went on to study literature and languages in Germany, Ireland, and Guatemala while working as a dishwasher, farmhand, freelance writer, and English teacher. After a decade away from the Upper Midwest, he returned to teach at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, where he is a professor of English. He teaches creative writing and the environmental humanities. He also regularly presents public readings and talks across the U.S. and abroad.