About Allie
Allie Rigby is a Bay Area poet and outdoor educator, with roots in the chaparral suburbs of Southern California. She remembers attending the yearly Association for Environmental & Outdoor Education (AEOE) conferences as a kid, tagging along with her parents and siblings and being in awe of all the environmental educators. After graduating college with a degree in environmental studies in 2014, Allie began her own career in environmental education as a naturalist at Walker Creek Ranch. She spent over five years as “Otter,” roaming the 1,700 acres with groups of 20 to 25 students each week, redesigning the program’s curriculum with a fabulous team of naturalists, and attending the BEETLES Leadership Institute in 2017.
One of Allie’s favorite writing experiences was joining the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop in 2019, with Sherwin Bitsui leading the poetry cohort. In 2020, Allie left Walker Creek Ranch to pursue a master of fine arts from San Francisco State University, with a focus on environmental poetry. As a graduate student, Allie continues to teach elementary students and edit for small presses. She also leads place-based writing workshops with the Point Reyes National Seashore Association.
Allie’s poems explore and challenge notions of wilderness, with threads on mental health, memory, and placemaking. She is drawn to work that involves critical thinking around sustainability, education, intersectional feminism, environmentalism, social justice, and the arts. You can learn more about her poetic endeavors at www.allierigby.com.
Creative writing, poetry, and placemaking are all ways to connect complex scientific ideas and to explore relationships to the environment. Writing, and the various ways in which humans share ideas and stories, is also part of a longer tradition of storytelling. For thousands of years, humans have expanded the confines of language to define and […]