Jack Collom

John Aldridge Collom (November 8, 1931 – July 2, 2017) was an American poet, essayist, and creative writing pedagogue. Included among the twenty-five books he published during his lifetime were Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955–2000; Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community; and Second Nature, which won the 2013 Colorado Book Award for Poetry. In the fields of education and creative writing, he was involved in eco-literature, ecopoetics, and writing instruction for children.

Life and work Jack Collom was born John Aldridge Collom in Chicago on November 8, 1931. He and his sister Jane Wodening grew up in the small town of Western Springs, Illinois, spent much of his time birdwatching, and over the years became an inveterate bird-watcher. Collom moved to Fraser, Colorado in 1947. Afterwards, he spent four years in the U.S. Air Force His unit was next stationed at Neubiberg, a base just south of Munich in Bavaria. It is there he met his first wife (a native German) in 1956. Collom moved back to the US after his discharge from the military but soon returned to Germany for a brief time to get married. They naturalized back to America in 1959 where he worked in factories for twenty years while writing poetry. Collom continued to teach creative writing to children for the next 35 years in both elementary and secondary schools, where he developed a pedagogy for this type of educational approach.

Subsequently, Teachers & Writers Collaborative published three books of Collom's essays and commentary on this experience (which included the young students' poems), notably Poetry Everywhere and Moving Windows. In 1989 he pioneered Eco-Lit, one of the first ecology literature courses ever offered in the United States. His nature writings and essays about the environment were published in various venues, including ecopoetics, The Alphabet of Trees: A Guide to Writing Nature Poetry,

He read and taught throughout the United States, in Mexico, Costa Rica, Austria, Belgium, and Germany. In 2008, he was the plenary speaker at the "Poetic Ecologies" conference at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. and Colors Born of Shadow, with Ken Bernstein,

In 2001, his adopted hometown of Boulder, Colorado, declared and celebrated a "Jack Collom Day".

Selected publications Poetry Arguing with Something Plato Said. (Rocky Ledge Editions, 1990) The Task. (Baksun Books, 1996) Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955–2000. (Tuumba Press, 2001) Exchanges of Earth and Sky. (Fish Drum Press, 2006) Situations, Sings (with Lyn Hejinian). (Adventures in Poetry, 2007) Second Nature. (Boulder, Co: Instance Press, 2012) Dot's Diner (with Elizabeth Robinson). (Colorado Springs, Co: Further Other Book Works, 2017)

Nonfiction Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community (with Sheryl Noethe). (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1994; 2nd edition, 2007) (contributor) Old Faithful: 18 Writers Present Their Favorite Writing Assignments, (ed. Ron Padgett). (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1995; 2nd edition, 2007) (editor) A Slow Flash of Light: An Anthology of Poems about Poetry. (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2008) Moving Windows: Evaluating the Poetry Children Write. (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2000) (contributor) The &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing (Illinois), 2013