Simmons Buntin is a project manager, editor, writer, publisher, marketer, communications manager, team leader, facilitator, thinker, creator, dog walker, and all-around good guy.
He is the editor-in-chief of Terrain.org, which he founded in 1997. He is also director 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 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. He has also 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 also teaches the occasional course at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and lectures on web project management, community design and sustainability, editing, and writing.
Currently, Simmons is the marketing and communications manager for the College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture 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. For more than a decade, he was also president of Ocotillo Design, though that side business is now static.
Simmons is certified by the Project Management Institute as a Professional Project Manager (PMP), the highest certification for the project management profession. He received his undergraduate degree in political science from Auburn University, his Master of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Colorado at Denver (where he was chosen as the program’s outstanding 1997 graduate and his thesis on redeveloping suburban downtowns using principles of sustainability won an American Planning Association – Colorado award), and his MFA in creative writing (nonfiction) from the University of Arizona. He also holds a certificate in energy management from North Carolina State University.
Simmons and his family recently moved from the new urbanist community of Civano in southeast Tucson, where he was actively involved in the Civano neighborhood association (until angry neighbors filled up his porch late one dark and metaphorically stormy evening, at which point his wife insisted he step down, an urging he thanks her for often) to the historic Sam Hughes neighborhood in central Tucson.
In his spare time he enjoys photography, hiking, reading, spirited driving in his Volkswagen GTI (hey, we’re all a paradox, aren’t we?), community events, literary readings, everything Harry Potter, and visiting national parks across the West. He volunteers his time at Terrain.org and Terrain Publishing, with the Cienega Watershed Partnership (he designed, built, and maintains their website), and as a panelist for local and state arts grants.
He welcomes your questions, comments, and requests to play Albus Dumbledore at your next Harry Potter celebration.
