Alaska Literary Series of the U of Alaska Press - March 20, 2012
by Kathleen McCoy |
Tuesday, March 20, 7:30-9:00pm
"Alaska Literary Series of the U of Alaska Press - March 20, 2012" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Fine Arts Building, Room 150 (map)
Four Alaskan writers will read from their new books at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, March
20, in Fine Arts Room 150 on the UAA Campus. Refreshments will be served prior to
the event. The event is free and open to the public. The UAA Bookstore will sell
books for signing before and after the event.
Peggy Shumaker, the Alaska State Writer Laureate, will host the Anchorage launch of the Alaska Literary Series. University of Alaska
Press is publishing three titles a year in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.
The readers are:
- Joan Kane, The Cormorant Hunter's Wife
A young Iñupiaq Eskimo poet, whose work speaks to the upheaval of families being exiled from their ancestral lands, Ms. Kane was educated at Harvard and Columbia universities and now lives in Anchorage. Her poems' syncopated cadences and evocative images bring to life the exceptional physical and cultural conditions of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions that have been home to her ancestors for tens of thousands of years. - Amber Flora Thomas, The Rabbits Could Sing
Ms. Thomas's first book, Eye of Water: Poems, won the Cave Canem Prize. Her poetry invites us into a world thick with the lush bounty of summer in the Far North, where the present is never far from the shadow of the past. She teaches at University of Alaska Fairbanks. - Nicole Stellon-O'Donnell, Steam Laundry
Buried in the belly of the Alaska and Polar Regions collection of the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks was a cache of letters to and from one of the first women to arrive in Fairbanks during the Gold Rush. From these letters grew a novel in verse form, Steam Laundry, the latest title from Boreal Books. Ms. Stellon-O'Donnell will speak about her research in the Alaska and Polar Regions collection and how that work turned into a book of poems. She is the winner of a Rasmuson Foundation grant, and teaches AP English at Lathrop High School. - Peggy Shumaker, reading from Marjorie Kowalski Cole's The City Beneath the Snow
Ms. Shumaker will give voice to excerpts from Ms. Cole's last book, published posthumously. This final collection of stories from an award-winning writer offers portraits of contemporary Alaskans that give readers an intimate portrait of a people and place more commonly showed in wilderness specials and reality adventure shows than in literary books. Some readers will know Ms. Cole's novel Correcting the Landscape, chosen by Barbara Kingsolver for the Bellwether Prize.
This event is sponsored by The UAA College of Arts and Sciences, Experience the Arts
2012and theDepartment of Creative Writing & Literary Arts, home of the Low Residency
MFA Program in Creative Writing. Questions regarding this event should be directed
to David Stevenson, director of the CWLA at (907) 786-6435.
"Alaska Literary Series of the U of Alaska Press - March 20, 2012" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.