Christine Colasurdo

Writer, teacher and calligrapher Christine Colasurdo was born in Portland, Oregon. She earned a double Bachelor of Arts degree in French and English from Portland State University in 1984. Upon graduating she moved to France, where she studied at the Université de Poitiers for a year and worked in Paris for two years. After returning to the U.S. in 1987, she worked as a graphic designer, writer, and editor in San Francisco, California. She earned her Master of Arts degree in English literature from U.C. Berkeley in 1992.

Colasurdo has published two books on the outdoors. Her first book, Return to Spirit Lake (1997), is a memoir of her experiences as a child camping, hiking, and working at Mount St. Helens in Washington. In 2005 it was honored as a “Washington Reads” book by the Washington State Librarian. Her second book, Golden Gate National Parks: A Photographic Journey (2002), is a short work celebrating the ecological and cultural richness of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in California. Her prose is featured in anthologies Holding Common Ground (2005) and In the Blast Zone (2008). She has given talks in Oregon, Washington, and California and has led tours to Mount St. Helens for the Oregon Historical Society and the Society of Environmental Journalists. In 2000 and 2005 she was a featured guest on National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation: Science Friday.” She was also a featured guest on Public Radio International’s “To The Best of Our Knowledge” program in 2000.

Colasurdo has created two museum exhibits about Mount St. Helens at the Cowlitz County Historical Museum, in Kelso, Washington: “Spirit Lake Remembered” in 2000 and “Hiking the Harmony Trail: Meditations on a Changing Landscape” in 2005. She exhibited “In the Land of Loowit” at the Vollum Institute in Portland, Oregon in 2007. As a volunteer, she has served on the board of the Mount St. Helens Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching people about volcanic landscapes. She has also worked for many years as an activist to protect the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument and its surrounding lands from proposed activities such as road-building, development, and mining. Her proposed name (“Tamanawas”) for the volcano’s new, post-1980 glacier was a finalist with the Washington State Board on Geographic Names.

Colasurdo’s other published works include prize-winning poems, scholarly essays, and articles in magazines including Audubon, Orion, and Sierra. Her poems have been published in the Denver Quarterly, Portland Magazine, Convolvulus, and other publications.

As a lettering artist and teacher, Colasurdo has exhibited her calligraphic work in regional and national exhibitions and has taught calligraphy classes and workshops for many years. She also writes on calligraphic topics for the international magazine, Letter Arts Review.

In 1997 and 2003, Colasurdo created two public schoolyard gardens in San Francisco featuring native plants of coastal California and organic herbs and vegetables. She taught outdoor science at Sunset Elementary School in San Francisco and wrote about gardening and nature-related topics for public radio KQED FM. In 2006 she returned to her hometown of Portland, where she is working on a second book about Mount St. Helens.

copyright 2010 Christine Colasurdo