In Memoriam: Drum Hadley

We recently lost a friend and colleague, Drum Hadley, author of Voice of the Borderlands.

Born into the Anheuser-Busch family, Drummond Hadley came to the Southwest to study poetry at the University of Arizona. He lived and worked for more than 40 years along the Mexico–New Mexico–Arizona border as a cowboy and rancher, while authoring four books of poetry. Drum founded the Animas Foundation, which supports sustainable agriculture in harmony with the environment. He was also a founding member of the Malpai Borderlands Group, a community-based ecosystem management project.

Rio Nuevo Publishers author Nathan F. Sayre wrote, “Poet, cowboy, iconoclast, and visionary, [Drum] cultivated radical ideas about the land and an unusually broad circle of friends.” Their publisher Ross Humphreys adds that Drum was “a very curious man who was as comfortable being among the major American poets of his generation as he was with the American and Mexican cowboys he worked with in the borderlands.”

Drum died peacefully on Thanksgiving morning in Cooperstown, New York.