William L. Fox

William L. Fox is a writer, independent scholar, and poet whose work is a sustained inquiry into how human cognition transforms land into landscape. His numerous nonfiction books rely upon fieldwork with artists and scientists in extreme environments to provide the narratives through which he conducts his investigations.

Fox was born in San Diego and attended Claremont McKenna College. He has edited several literary magazines and presses, among them the West Coast Poetry Review, and worked as a consulting editor for university presses, as well as being the former director of the poetry program at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

In the visual arts, Fox has exhibited text works in more than two dozen group and solo exhibitions in seven countries, served as the Associate Director of the Nevada Museum of Art, and then as the visual arts and architecture critic for the Reno Gazette-Journal newspaper.

In late 1979 he went to work at the Nevada Arts Council, first as the Coordinator of the Artists-in-Residence Program, then Deputy Director, and in 1984 Executive Director, a post he held until leaving in 1993 to write full time.

Fox has published poems, articles, reviews, and essays in more than seventy magazines, has had fourteen collections of poetry published in three countries, and has written eight nonfiction books about the relationships among art, cognition, and landscape. He has taught rockclimbing at the University of Nevada, as well as led treks in the Himalaya.

In 2001-02 he spent two-and-a-half months in the Antarctic with the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Visiting Artists and Writers Program. Fox has also worked as a team member of NASA’s Haughton-Mars Project, which tests methods of exploring Mars on Devon Island in [the Canadian High Arctic.] He was a visiting scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, has twice been a Lannan Foundation writer-in-residence, and has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Author's Presentations

Terra Antarctica is a slide lecture about the history of artistic, cartographic, and scientific images of the Antarctic, the world's most isolated continent. Fox shows how human cognition reacts to deserts, and then, when our neurophysiology fails to cope with such large and apparently empty spaces, how we deploy cultural means such as maps and pictures to compensate. Fox conducts a guided tour of the world's largest desert -- its frozen expanses, the world's southernmost active volcano, the South Pole, and the Dry Valleys where it has not rained for two million years. Along the way, he traces how its art has changed since the first paintings were made inside the Antarctic Circle in 1773.

Climbing Mount Limbo: On the Edge of Land and Language is an account of how Fox developed as a writer. He reads from his poetry and "essays on the edge of land and language," and shows how his climbing and hiking in some of the world's most extreme landscapes shaped an experimental literary aesthetic. The talk is illustrated with slides from both realms.

Selected Works on landscape by William L. Fox