Adelheid Fischer

Adelheid Fischer is co-director of InnovationSpace, a sustainable product-development program at Arizona State University. She leads the program’s biomimicry initiative, which introduces students to the use of biology as a means of sustainable innovation in design, business, and engineering. She also serves as assistant director of ASU’s Biomimicry Center.

Fischer is a writer who focuses on natural history, ecology, and environmental history. She has written for many publications, including Utne Reader, Orion, Conservation, Places, and Arizona Highways. She is co-author of Valley of Grass: Tallgrass Prairie and Parkland of the Red River Region, winner of a Minnesota Book Award for Nature Writing, and North Shore: A Natural History of Minnesota’s Superior Coast. In 2014 she received the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award. She is working on a book that explores the ecology of grief and loss in the sky islands of southeastern Arizona. In spring 2017 a collection of her essays will be published by Zygote Books.

Fischer makes her home at the foot of South Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona, where she shares her yard, and sometimes her house, with nighthawks, southern house spiders, scorpions, coyotes, cactus wrens, and the occasional javelina.