Friday, December 16, 7:00 p.m. in the Bear Gallery

Join Fairbanks Arts in the Bear Gallery for a literary reading with Jessica Cherry, co-editor of the anthology Wheels on Ice: Cycling in Alaska. 

Wheels on Ice reveals Alaska’s key role in bicycling both as a mode of travel and as an endurance sport, as well as its special allure for those seeking the proverbial struggle against nature. This collection opens with the first bicycle boom and the advent of the safety bicycle in the late 1800s; at approximately the same time, gold was discovered in Alaska and the Yukon Territory. As bicycles evolved, Alaskans were among the first to innovate: the fatbike, for example, evolved from the mountain bike in the late 1980s into a wider-framed bike with fatter tires, making snow biking more accessible and giving birth to the Iditabike race.

This anthology’s diverse group of stories covers cycling, both past and present. From riders commuting in every kind of weather to those seeking long-distance adventure in the most remote sections of the United States, these stories will inspire cyclists to ride into their own stories in Alaska and beyond.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact (907) 251-8386 or email literary@fairbanksarts.org.

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Jessica Cherry is a geoscientist, writer, and commercial airplane pilot living in Anchorage. She wrote a weekly literary column for the Anchorage Press from 2019-2022 and was a 2022 Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Awardee.

Co-editor Frank Soos (1950–2021) is the author of The Getting Place; Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult Questions; Bamboo Fly Rod Suite, and Early Yet and coauthor of Double Moon: Constructions and Conversations. He was a professor emeritus of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.