Biography

Doann Houghton-Alico is a prize-winning author of both poetry and technical books. Maps, remote places, different cultures, and travel have always fascinated Doann, who is a New Yorker by birth and slight accent. Although always with a home back in Briarcliff Manor, an hour north of New York City, she also lived in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and southern California as a child, and never lost her love of the Southwest.

In 1973 in the process of a divorce, she loaded up her three children and their dog in her VW camper and headed west, ending up in Telluride, CO, where, with a friend, she started the Deep Creek Review, a literary and issue-oriented investigative journal, was elected to the first “newcomer” town council, and worked as general contractor and electrician for the home she built there. Having previously been an environmental public interest lobbyist working mainly with the U.S. Senate on aspects of the Clean Air Act, and others, she found small-town local politics an interesting change and challenge. She left Telluride in 1979 for Denver for a real job and better schooling for her children.

After serving as a consultant for a nonprofit involved in cross-cultural training, she started her own technical writing company, which she sold when she retired about the same time as her second husband, a United Airlines Captain, who knew exactly when he had to retire (at that time it was age 60). Having been sailors for several years, they then sailed around the world for 10 years. Upon their return, they settled in the central Colorado Rockies.

Doann is a member of the Shavano Poets’ Society and Columbine Poets of Colorado, the state poetry society.