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EVENTS and ANNOUNCEMENTS
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Best American Poetry 2016 features Anchorage-based Olena Kalytiak Davis‘s poem “On the Certainty of Bryan”, previously published in Alaska Quarterly Review. Also, Best American Short Stories 2016 features Daniel O’Malley‘s story “Bridge” and Raul Palma‘s story “Eminent Domain” is cited as a Distinguished Story of the year. Best American Essays 2016 features an essay by Ela Helen Harrison.
SOUTHCENTRAL
ANCHORAGE | Friday, October 21, 2016 from 6 pm at Anchorage Museum | Polar Nights: Unbound | Words, page, and performance collide in this evening of “Unbound.” Sean Hill (Fairbanks) and Susanna Mishler (Anchorage) present their poetry interspersed with performative book demonstrations by book artist Susan Joy Share (Anchorage). After the readings, stay to try a hand at printing on a pop up woodblock press with Susan Share and take home your own literary work. Included with admission. More info
ANCHORAGE | Friday, October 21, 2016 from 4-6:00 pm at UAA Campus Bookstore | Don Quixote Among Us 400+ Years | This round table discussion will feature an introduction to the literary work, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, and its famed author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and includes bilingual readings and multimedia representations throughout the centuries. Speakers include UAA faculty from the Department of Languages– Dr. Patricia Fagan, Dr. Rebeca Maseda, Dr. Francisco Miranda and Dr. Ray Ball, History Department.
ANCHORAGE | Saturday, October 22, 2016 from 1-4:00 pm at UAA Campus Bookstore | The Cursed Child: Dramatic Readings and Performance | Dramatic readings and performances of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two featuring local Alaskan actors and UAA faculty.
ANCHORAGE | Tuesday, October 25 from 5-7:00 pm at UAA Campus Bookstore | The Conflicted Life of Lithuanian Poet Salomeja Neris (1904-1945) | Talis Colberg, Svaja Vansauskas Worthington, and Carole Anderson come together for a literary and historical analysis of the poet Salomeja Neris, considered the Emily Dickinson of Lithuania. Her controversial life, bilingual poetry readings, and the challenges of translation will be highlighted.
ANCHORAGE | Thursday, October 27, 2016 from 6-8 pm at Mountain View Public Library | Polar Harmonies: An Arctic Musical History | This Tundra Visions Community Lecture Series event presents Paul Krejci on a musical journey of exchange between whalers and Native inhabitants in the western Arctic. Paul’s talk will discuss the region’s musical and ethno-historical legacies, particularly those of explorers, traders, whalers, and indigenous peoples of past centuries. In the summer of 2013, Paul spent six weeks along the western and northern coastlines of Alaska and Canada on a 46-foot motorsailer investigating the careers and impacts of explores and traders who participated in musical exchanges with Native populations of the North during the early part of the 20th century. His research interests combine the disciplines of music and anthropology and examines musicultural change and early musical processes of globalization in the western Arctic. Paul Krejci, PhD teaches course for the Music Department, Philosophy and Humanities Department as well as the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. more info
ANCHORAGE | Saturday, October 29 at the UAA/APU Consortium Library room 307 | Author Ernestine Hayes presents her new book The Tao of Raven: An Alaskan Native Memoir. In The Tao of Raven, using the story of Raven and the Box of Daylight and relating it to Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Ernestine Hayes expresses an ongoing frustration and anger at the obstacles and prejudices still facing Alaska Natives in their own land, while sharing her own story of attending and completing college in her fifties and becoming a professor and a writer. Ernestine Saankalaxt’ Hayes belongs to the Kaagwaantaan clan of the Eagle side of the Lingit nation. Her first book, Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir received the American Book Award in 2007 and was chosen as the 2016 Alaska Reads selection. Ernestine Hayes received her MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Arts from UAA and is an assistant professor of English at UAS.
ANCHORAGE | November 3, 2016 | The Salmon Project presents Salmon Life: Stories, a salmon storytelling event in Anchorage on the last night of the Salmon and People Workshops. Storytellers, short films and great company. Get your tickets today! This event will likely sell out.
ANCHORAGE | November 4-6, 2016 | Anchorage Public Library fall book, music, and movies sale. Details here.
SEWARD | November 9, 2016 | Cirque Reads with Friends – Writers and poets from Seward, Anchorage, and beyond read original work. Poetry, prose, music, prizes, and a special menu at The Cookery and Oyster Bar. Doors at 5, program begins at 6.
ANCHORAGE | Thursday, November 10, 2016, 7-8:30 pm, location TBA | 49 Writers Reading and Craft Talk Series presents Bryan Allen Fierro, author of Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul (The University of Arizona Press). Bryan Fierro received his MFA in fiction from Pacific University in Oregon in 2013. He won the Poets and Writers 2013 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award in Fiction, and placed in both the 2013 Hemingway International Short Story Contest and Masters Workshop at the Tucson Book Festival. His stories have appeared in the literary journals Copper Nickel and Quarterly West. Originally from Los Angeles, California, he has lived in Alaska for thirteen years, and currently works as a firefighter/paramedic for the Anchorage Fire Department. Dodger Blue is his debut book of stories.
ANCHORAGE | Friday, November 11, 2016, 7:30 pm, Anchorage Museum | Polar Nights: Charles Wohlforth’s Beyond Earth Book Launch – Author Charles Wohlforth presents his new book, Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets. A leading planetary scientist and an award-winning science writer offer groundbreaking research and argue persuasively that Titan (a moon of Saturn with a nitrogen atmosphere), a weather cycle, and an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy offers the most realistic and thrilling prospect of life without support from Earth. Included with Museum admission.
ANCHORAGE | November 16, 2016 | Poetry Parley featuring Jeremy Pataky – details TBA
ANCHORAGE | March 31-April 1, 2017 | Organized by the graduate students within the English department, the Pacific Rim Conference on English Studies invites submissions in literature, rhetoric and composition, linguistics, anthropology, history, journalism, gender studies and other related fields. See the call for proposals here.
INTERIOR
FAIRBANKS | The University of Alaska Fairbanks English Department will host the 2016 Dead Writers event Friday, Oct. 28, at the Blue Loon. Dead Writers, now in its 26th year, is an annual Halloween event that raises funds for the Midnight Sun Visiting Writers Series, which brings talented writers to Fairbanks for readings and workshops. The doors will open at 6 p.m., with performances beginning at 7 p.m. The reading features university students, professors and community members performing, in costume, as their favorite deceased writer. Grand prizes will be awarded for the best performances of the night, and door prizes will be offered throughout the evening. Spectators are welcome, but must be 21 or older to attend. Tickets are $12 if purchased in advance or $15 at the door. Tickets can be purchased in advance at the UAF Wood Center or by contacting Micah Allen, English student and Dead Writers organizer. “Dead Writers is the quintessential liberal arts experience. It is the ultimate fusion of literature, performance art and degeneracy,” says James Campbell, a past first-place winner. “Performers dress up under such illustrious names as Julia Child, Emily Dickinson, William ‘Shakesbeer’ or Carl Sagan and read a piece of the dead author’s work, modify it to suit a theme, or make it up on the fly, always in the interest of pushing good taste. It is an annual community-fed rabble-hall for the creative and the morally bankrupt alike.”
FAIRBANKS | Fairbanks Arts Association hosts the oldest literary reading series in the state. Every month, writers reading their own work publicly at a community meet-up where people can connect with other lovers of literature. Readings are held on the day after First Friday, usually the first Saturday of the month at 7 pm. Most reading are held in the Bear Gallery in Pioneer Park, although occasionally in the summer (June, July, and August) the weather is beautiful reading are held outside to another spot in Pioneer Park. Upcoming:
November: Nicole Stellon O’Donnell
December: TBA
Additional readings and events may be held, but the First Saturday Literary Reading Series is monthly at 7 pm the day after First Friday (except February).
SOUTHEAST
JUNEAU | Frank Soos and Margo Klass speaks at 7 pm at UAS Egan Lecture Hall Thursday October 27, 2016. 
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CONFERENCES, RETREATS, and RESIDENCIES
The entirety of Southeast Alaska is encompassed by the Cascadia bioregion. The fourth Cascadia Poetry Festival occurs November 3-6, 2016 in Seattle, Washington. http://cascadiapoetryfestival.org/
OPPORTUNITIES and AWARDS for WRITERS
The Governor’s Awards for the Arts and Humanities ceremony will be held in Juneau on Thursday, January 26, 2017. Visit ASCA’s website here for information about last year’s Governor’s Awardees, and here for the Alaska State Writer Laureate program.
Tidal Echoes out of Juneau and Alaska Women Speak are both accepting submissions.
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