DOLORES HAYDEN

Historian Dolores Hayden is the author of six award-winning books about the character and design of American cities and suburbs. Also a widely-published poet who often writes about the landscape, she teaches at Yale University where she recently created a new class on "Poets' Landscapes."

Her most recent non-fiction books include Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (Pantheon, 2003) and A Field Guide to Sprawl (with aerial photographs by Jim Wark, W.W. Norton, 2004). These titles have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, CNN and The Diane Rehm Show.

Her earlier works include Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975 (MIT Press, 1976) and The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (MIT Press, 1981). Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life (W.W. Norton, 1984, rev. ed., 2002) explores housing and child care, tracing the United States experience in contrast to England, France, Sweden, and the Soviet Union.

As founder and president of The Power of Place, a non-profit arts and humanities group based in Los Angeles from 1984 to 1991, Hayden laid out a downtown itinerary to celebrate the historic landscape of the center of the city and its ethnic diversity. Under her direction, collaborative projects on an African American midwife's homestead, a Latina garment workers' union headquarters, and Japanese-American flower fields engaged citizens, historians, artists, and designers in examining and commemorating the working lives of ordinary citizens, projects documented in The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (The MIT Press, 1995).

Hayden's work has been widely translated. She has received an American Library Association Notable Book Award, two awards for Excellence in Design Research from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Graduate Medal for outstanding scholarship, the Davidoff Award for an outstanding book in Urban Planning, the Donald Award for feminist scholarship, and many other prizes. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and held Rockefeller, ACLS/​Ford, Radcliffe, and CASBS fellowships as well.

Before Yale, Hayden taught at MIT, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. She is an alumna of Mount Holyoke College, Cambridge University, and Harvard University, where she received her professional degree in architecture.

Her new poetry collection, Nymph, Dun, and Spinner, was published in fall 2010. American Yard appeared in 2004. Recent poems are in The Yale Review, Southwest Review, Slate, The Best American Poetry 2009, and Verse Daily. She has received awards from the Poetry Society of America and the New England Poetry Club. In 2008 she gave the Yale Phi Beta Kappa poem. She is a Connecticut Performing Artist and a New England States Touring artist eligible for public funding for her readings and workshops.