Simmons Buntin is an author, editor, project manager, publisher, marketer, communications director, team leader, facilitator, photographer, nonprofit director, thinker, creator, dog walker, and all-around good guy.
He is the editor-in-chief of Terrain.org, the world’s first online literary journal of place, which he founded in 1997. He is also director and board member of Terrain Publishing, the small parent nonprofit organization that provides the business structure for Terrain.org and related educational, scientific, and literary activities.
Simmons is the author of Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far (Trinity University Press), which was named a Literary Hub top-100 independent press book of 2025. He is the co-editor of the anthology Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy and the author of a book of community case studies — Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places — as well as two books of poetry published by Ireland’s Salmon Poetry: Bloom and Riverfall. Simmons has published literary and technical writing, as well as a few photographs, in such venues as Orion, ISLE, Kyoto Review, North American Review, and Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society. He teaches the occasional course at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and lectures on creative writing, publishing, editing, sustainable design and planning, and project management.
Simmons is the director of marketing and communications for the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona. In that capacity, he is responsible for marketing, branding, communications, media relations, and storytelling for the college and its programs.
Simmons is certified by the Project Management Institute as a Professional Project Manager (PMP), the highest certification for the project management profession. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Auburn University, a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Colorado at Denver (where he was chosen as the program’s outstanding graduate and his thesis on redeveloping suburban downtowns using principles of sustainability won an American Planning Association Colorado Chapter award), and a MFA in Creative Writing (Nonfiction) from the University of Arizona. He also holds a Certificate in Energy Management from North Carolina State University.
In his spare time he enjoys photography (check out his Flower a Day project on Instagram @fotosimmons), hiking, reading, community-building, literary readings, and visiting national parks and mixed-use communities across the West. He volunteers his time at Terrain.org and Terrain Publishing. He lives in the Community of Civano in southeast Tucson, Arizona.
He welcomes your questions, comments, and requests to play Albus Dumbledore at your next Harry Potter celebration.
