Diana Woodcock

Diana Woodcock

Diana Woodcock holds a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University, where she researched poetry’s role in the search for an environmental ethic. In 1974, she earned a BS degree in Psychology, and in 2004 an MFA degree in creative writing. She has worked as a counselor with delinquent youth, an editor of a young women’s magazine, and a teacher of English as a second language. For nearly eight years, she lived in Tibet, Macau, and on the Thai-Cambodian border teaching and working with refugees. Since 2004, she has been teaching creative writing, environmental literature and composition at VCUarts Qatar. She is the author of seven chapbooks and five poetry collections, most recently Holy Sparks (a finalist for the 2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award) and Facing Aridity (a finalist for the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature). She is the recipient of the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award, the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women (for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders), a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and a Best of the Net nominee. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2008, Women’s Review of Books, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Humanities Review, Spiritus, Comstock Review, and other journals and anthologies, as well as in the Everglades National Park as part of an O, Miami Poetry Festival event and at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill (OCARC Show: Outer Cape Artist Residence Coalition, Truro, MA). Her grand prize-winning poem, “Music as Scripture,” was performed onstage in Lincoln Park, San Francisco by Natica Angilly's Poetic Dance Theater Company at Artists Embassy International’s 21st Dancing Poetry Festival.