Editor’s Note: Please Join us in Anchorage on Friday, November 15, 2019 at 7 PM at The Writer’s Block Bookstore & Café in Anchorage. 49 Writers, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Center for the Narrative & Lyric Arts present two engaging and provocative stories from the new AQR edition: Lee Conell’s “Ex Party” and Debbi Urbanksi’s […]
Mary Odden | Old Guns, New Guns in AQR Read More »
We threw our Winter Words celebration on a rather spring-like afternoon last Sunday in Anchorage’s Stuckagain Heights neighborhood. Originally slated for December 2nd, we postponed due to—you guessed it—the November 30th earthquake. Interim Board President Barbara Hood hosted this fundraiser in her home. It was a gorgeous day with lush light, long views, and great company (not to mention stable ground). It felt
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Louise Erdrich told a small group of Alaskan writers gathered at Tutka Bay Lodge outside of Homer a month ago that poetry is lightning and prose is rain. She also said that our survival as a species may just depend on telling stories. It’s in our DNA. I read the other day that literature is
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AQR: More Important To Me Than I Could Have Guessed A lot of the things that happen in the north could happen anywhere. I remember driving a gravel piece of the Alcan Highway behind a motorcycle that fishtailed in the deep gravel then crashed, flinging its rider upside down in the air. We watched her
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A NATIONAL BEACON: AQR @ 35 I first submitted poems to Alaska Quarterly Review in August, 2001 – almost exactly a year before I moved from Cape Cod to Anchorage to begin the MFA program there. Amazingly, editor Ron Spatz took “The Oarfish.” It was one of the first five poems I’d had accepted for publication in
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This is the first in a series of four posts honoring Alaska Quarterly Review‘s 35th Anniversary. ~ 49 Writers, Inc. EDITOR’S NOTE: 35th Anniversary By Ronald Spatz, Co-founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief Alaska Quarterly Review It took Alaska Quarterly Review (AQR) 37 years to reach this 35th season. If that math seems strange, we’re counting the
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Cheered on by readers who told me that an essay dedicated to old friend Norman Wilkins “worked,” though it was written in various moods and moments over about 20 years, I’m going to take a moment to finger that miracle. The essay is a small bucket of improbables—love for the consummate knowledge of two woodsman
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We’re glad to partner with Alaska Quarterly Review and the Alaska Humanities Forum on a two-part retrospective celebration of one of Alaska’s most important thinkers and writers, Gary Holthaus. Gary’s been active as a writer and citizen for decades, as the bio below illustrates. A long-time home literary events, Great Harvest Bread Co. in Anchorage
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A slightly shorter version originally appeared in the Anchorage Press, here. photo credit: Pete Woodhead I call John Luther Adams from my cabin near McCarthy. He’s maintained his 907 area code, though I know he’s relocated to New York City after 40 years in Alaska. My spot in the woods seems more akin to his
Jeremy Pataky | Silences So Deep: A Conversation with John Luther Adams Read More »
This week, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Chairman Jane Chu announced the super-exciting news that 49 Writers has been selected to receive a $10,000 NEA Challenge America grant to support a September 2015 literary tour in Southeast Alaska featuring author Melinda Moustakis. This grant will allow us to partner with Alaska Quarterly Review to
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