Dolores Hayden

DOLORES HAYDEN is the author of several award-winning books about the history of American landscapes and the politics of place. Also widely-published poet who often writes about the landscape, she is Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University.

Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000, was published by Pantheon Books in 2003. A Field Guide to Sprawl (with aerial photographs by Jim Wark, published by W.W. Norton, 2004) has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, CNN and The Diane Rehm Show. Her early books include Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975 (MIT Press, 1976) and The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (MIT Press, 1981). Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life (W.W. Norton, 1984, rev. and expanded ed., 2002) explores the housing needs of women, tracing the United States experience in contrast to other societies including England, France, Sweden, and the Soviet Union.

As founder and president of The Power of Place, a non-profit arts and humanities group based in Los Angeles from 1984 to 1991, Hayden laid out a downtown itinerary to celebrate the historic landscape of the center of the city and its ethnic diversity. Under her direction, collaborative projects on an African American midwife's homestead, a Latina garment workers' union headquarters, and Japanese-American flower fields engaged citizens, historians, artists, and designers in examining and commemorating the working lives of ordinary citizens. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (The MIT Press, 1995), documents her Los Angeles work.

She has received numerous awards, including an American Library Association Notable Book Award, an award for Excellence in Design Research from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Graduate Medal, the Davidoff Award for an outstanding book in Urban Planning from the ACSP, and the Donald Award for feminist scholarship from the American Planning Association. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and received Rockefeller, ACLS/Ford, Radcliffe, and CASBS fellowships as well.

Since 1973, Hayden has taught in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and American Studies at MIT, UC Berkeley, and UCLA as well as Yale. She was educated at Mount Holyoke College, Cambridge University, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she received her professional degree in architecture.

Hayden's poetry appears literary journals including The Yale Review, Southwest Review, The Kenyon Review, and Verse Daily. She has received awards from the Poetry Society of America and the New England Poetry Club. Her collection, American Yard, was runner up for the best book award from the New England Poetry Club. In 2008 she gave the Yale Phi Beta Kappa poem. She is a Connecticut Performing Artist and a New England States Touring artist eligible for public funding for her readings and workshops.

She is the widow of sociologist and novelist Peter H. Marris, and the mother of a twenty-year-old daughter, Laura Hayden Marris.

Office: Yale University, P.O. Box 208242, New Haven CT 06520-8242.