About

Tami Haaland is the author of four poetry collections, If I Had Said Beauty, What Does Not Return, When We Wake in the Night, and Breath in Every Room, winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. In addition, Bear Scratch Press at the University of Montana published a quire, or sequence of six poems, roughly based on the Demeter myth and titled Bright Flower.

Haaland’s poems have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, including, South Dakota Review, Fugue, Ascent, Consequence, The American Journal of Poetry, Cascadia Field Guide, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and Healing the Divide.  Her work has also been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Slowdown.

A graduate of the University of Montana MA in Literature program and the Bennington College MFA in Creative Writing and Literature program, Haaland served as Montana's Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015 and has received a Governor’s Humanities Award, an Artist Innovation Award from Montana Arts Council, and was awarded writing residencies from Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Foundation and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.

Haaland has offered readings and workshops in England and Germany as well as many locations in the U.S.  She was invited to read at the National Book Festival in 2003, the first year that poetry became a part of this celebration. She was one of many artists who collaborated with UK filmmaker Anna Cady on her Elemental Dialogue series which was shown at festivals and other venues in Scotland and England, including the Tremenheere Sculpture Garden in Cornwall. 

For five years, she taught poetry and literature at Montana Women’s Prison, where she collaborated with psychology and social work colleagues to develop a narrative therapy course and with artist Dennis Kern to assist students in developing their own literary magazine. Haaland has worked at Montana State University for many years, primarily as a professor of Creative Writing and for several years as a Dean of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.