About William Carney

William Carney’s poetry has been awarded two American Academy of Poets prizes and a Hutchinson Fellowship at Williams College. His books include Beaches, an environment of poems; Cities, a nuclear peace poem; and Mountain, an evolutionary epic.

As a landscape architect, he oversaw the design and construction of Yerba Buena Gardens in downtown San Francisco, where he served with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency for twenty-five years. He is principal of Landscript Associates, an environmental writing and design practice.

The son of an Air Force colonel and a public school teacher, Carney was born in Nebraska and grew up in Bermuda, Virginia, Ohio, and Hawaii, where he graduated from Punahou School before attending college in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California.

He now lives and writes in northern California. Active in climate issues and community life, he is president of Sustainable San Rafael, past president of Friends of the Urban Forest, finance chair of the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, and helped launch the Museum of the African Diaspora.