Reverent Flora: The Arabian Desert's Botanical Bounty

Diana Woodcock holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where she researched poetry's role in the search for an environmental ethic. In 1974, she earned a B.S. degree in Psychology, and in 2004 an M.F.A. 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 six poetry collections, most recently Heaven Underfoot, winner of the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award; Holy Sparks, a finalist for the 2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award; and Facing Aridity, a finalist for the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature. Her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant's Shoulders, won the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize. She is 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. 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.