Don’t miss this special book launch celebration and reading!
Authors from Anchorage, Fairbanks, Homer and Kodiak will be reading from recent publications. Authors will be on hand for questions and books will be available for sale.
Saturday May 4th, 7pm
Bear Gallery
Alaska Centennial Center for the Arts
2300 Airport Way
Pioneer Park, Fairbanks
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Erin Couglin Hollowell, Pause, Traveler (Homer)
Pause, Traveler is a journey from New York City to Alaska, through the dark heart of the American landscape. These poems search for redemption in the most unlikely places, Circus World Museum, an Iceworm Festival, or a frozen gas station in Alaska. Traversing the difficult terrain of damaged relationships and misplaced affection, this collection finds hope in the fractured beauty of the world.
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Carolyn Kremers, Upriver (Fairbanks)
“What excites me about Carolyn Kremers’ Upriver: Just when you think you know where a particular poem has parachuted you into the vast terrain we call Alaska, everything shifts: foreground, background, attitude, mood, generation, gender, language and custom, a vast landscape and history deeply violated, deeply loved. Alaska herself—a sometimes cruel, ever demanding shape-shifting region—feeds, inhabits and haunts these pages. . . . This beautiful book—snow-packed, melting, thick with time, spiritualized with dashes of rhyme and dollops of dance and prayer—reads like a lyric break-through memoir of open and often discomforting discovery and brave self revelation.”
Al Young, former poet laureate of California
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Sara Loewen, Gaining Daylight (Kodiak)
For many the idea of living off the land is a romantic notion left to stories of olden days or wistful dreams at the office. But for Sara Loewen it becomes her way of life each summer as her family settles into their remote cabin on Uyak Bay for the height of salmon season. With this connection to thousands of years of fishing and gathering at its core, Gaining Daylight explores what it means to balance lives on two islands, living within both an ancient way of life and the modern world. Her personal essays integrate natural and island history with her experiences of fishing and family life, as well as the challenges of living at the northern edge of the Pacific.
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Mei Mei Evans, Oil and Water (Anchorage)
Oil and Water, by Mei Mei Evans
What happens when the American dream collides head-on with a nation’s dependence on fossil fuels? Oil and Water, a novel by Mei Mei Evans, focuses on precisely this question. Starting with a star-crossed supertanker, a wayward fishing boat, and a well-known hazard in the Gulf of Alaska, the story presents a region plunged into an oil-slicked crisis. As thousands of miles of shoreline and sea are obliterated, the spill threatens the lives and livelihoods of the coastal community of Selby.
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Peggy Shumaker, Toucan Nest (Fairbanks)
Toucan Nest, by Peggy Shumaker
“This is a book of burnished, lapidary attention. Its poems – vibrant with seeing, quickened with sound-work, subtled by insight – peel open landscapes both outer and inner. The costs of our human presence and extractions are in these pages, but also the radiant return of human awareness. Toucan Nest is a unique account of encounter, imaginative inquiry, and expansion.”
— Jane Hirshfield
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For questions please contact Jill Shipman at jill@fairbanksarts.org or at 456-6485 ext.222
For the event flyer: ALS-Boreal Flyer