Listen to the audio:
CROSSCURRENTS EVENT: TOM KIZZIA AND SETH KANTNER
Moderated by Don Reardon
Recorded: Saturday April 2, 2022
7 PM-8:30 PM
The Nave, 3502 Spenard Road
Anchorage, Alaska
Haunted by Alaska: Join us for a Crosscurrents conversation with Tom Kizzia and Seth Kantner, two of Alaska’s most well-known and beloved authors, about how the state’s fast-changing histories, ecosystems, communities, and cultures have shaped their writing and their lives. Or, as Seth and Tom would argue, how books, beer, and banter have shaped their lives. Moderated by Don Reardon. Sponsored by 49 Writers with support from Porphyry Press.
Tom Kizzia is the author of Cold Mountain Path, the new history of the ghost town decades in McCarthy-Kennecott. He wrote the 2013 bestseller Pilgrim’s Wilderness, chosen by the New York Times as the best true crime book set in Alaska, and the village travel narrative The Wake of the Unseen Object, recently re-issued in the Alaska classics series of the University of Alaska Press. He traveled widely in rural Alaska during a 25-year career as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017. He received an Artist Fellowship from the Rasmuson Foundation and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. A graduate of Hampshire College, he lives in Homer, and has a place in the Wrangell Mountains outside McCarthy.
Seth Kantner was born and raised in northern Alaska and has worked as a trapper, wilderness guide, wildlife photographer, gardening teacher, and adjunct professor. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Orion, and Smithsonian. Kantner is the author of his newest release A Thousand Trails Home, the award-winning novel Ordinary Wolves, the memoir Shopping for Porcupine, and a collection of essays, Swallowed by the Great Land: And Other Dispatches from Alaska’s Frontier. He has been a commercial fisherman in Kotzebue Sound for more than four decades and lives in the Northwest Arctic.