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THE CONTRIBUTORS

Martha Amore [editor]

Indra Arriaga is a Mexican artist, writer, and research analyst. She enjoys the great Alaska outdoors from the comfort of warm spaces, along with good food, strong drinks, and great company. A Libra, she is fascinated by noses and is a sucker for full lips.

Teeka A. Ballas has worked as a freelance writer and editor, staffer and stringer for newspapers, international wire services, travel publications, and radio. The cofounder of F Magazine, Ballas has worked tirelessly for seven years as editor and publisher of Alaska’s only volunteer-run, independent arts and culture publication. As of 2015, she has placed the magazine on hiatus while she focuses her attention on working with her partner, Dawnell Smith on a multimedia project that entails an art documentary, a dual memoir, and an audio slideshow collectively titled, “Exhuming My Father.”

Gabrielle Barnett has been a frequent contributor to Cirque Journal. She has also placed poetry and nonfiction with Alaska Women Speak, Wild Voices, POL, and Contact Quarterly; her poetry was recognized in F Magazine's 2014 statewide writing contest, and her nonfiction won a 1993 Alaska Press Club award. With a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU, she taught as contingent faculty member at UAA from 1993 to 2013. She calls the coastal forest and mountains of Turnagain Arm home, seeking balance between the pulls of modern city life and the wish for a quiet backwoods retreat.

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collections Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, and Once Removed. An instructor in the low-residency MFA program at University of Alaska Anchorage, contributing editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she lives on Cape Cod and works a naturalist.

Laura Carpenter survives Alaska winters by sledding, running in studded shoes, and drinking chai lattes. She works too hard for the largest museum in the state and plays just as hard with her daughter and (now legal!) wife. Her publications include Curve, The New York Times, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Pride Blog, Naked Ptarmigan, NorthView, Inside Passages, and more.

Jerah Chadwick is a former resident of the Aleutian Island of Unalaska, where he raised goats and wrote poetry while living in an abandoned World War II military compound for seventeen years. In 1988, he began teaching for and directed the University of Alaska extension program for the Aleutian/Pribilof Island region. He holds degrees from Lake Forest College, Illinois, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. A recipient of an Alaska State Council on the Arts Writing Fellowship, Chadwick’s poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada, and Ireland. He is the author of three chapbooks as well as a volume of poetry, Story Hunger.

Lucian Childs [editor]

Mei Mei Evans is the author of Oil and Water, a novel based on the events of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether prize as well as the first novel published in the University of Alaska Press Literary Series. She is Professor of English at Alaska Pacific University and co-editor of The Environmental Justice Reader.

Sandy Gillespie, writer and artist, lived in Alaska for twenty-two years. She worked as a professional artist and arts administrator and exhibited extensively in Alaska, including solo shows at the Anchorage Museum and the Alaska State Museum in Juneau. Her work is in the permanent collections of these institutions and the Museum of the North in Fairbanks. Gillespie currently works out of her Minneapolis studio. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UAF and continues to teach online for the Kachemak Bay Campus of UAA.

Morgan Grey, despite growing up in Nebraska, has always felt the pull of the sea and been fascinated by the legends of the seal people that span the North Atlantic from Norway to Iceland. She is working on a novel about June’s selkie family in Prince William Sound. In the late 1970s Morgan was a founding member of the Lincoln Legion of Lesbians, a radical dyke collective that organized conferences, concerts, and other events promoting lesbian community and visibility. She was a volunteer and later office manager for the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage and is a former Executive Director of 49 Writers.

Amy Groshek holds an MFA from the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is a graduate student in the PhD program in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Amy’s work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Contrary, Bloom, and Fence. Her chapbook, Shin Deep, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2008.

Alyse Knorr is the author of Copper Mother (Switchback Books, forthcoming), Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books, 2013), and Alternates (dancing girl press, 2014). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, ZYZZYVA, Columbia Poetry Journal, The Greensboro Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press, 2012), among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University. She serves as a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press and teaches at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Rosemary McGuire has been working as a commercial fisherman for fourteen years, on boats from San Diego to Norton Sound. She has also worked in Antarctica and in field camps across Alaska. She has traveled most of Alaska’s river systems by canoe. Her collection of short stories The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea was published by the University of Alaska Press in 2015.

M.C. MoHagani Magnetek is a transgender African American anthropologist, writer, poet, and artist. She draws inspiration from within to create stories and narratives about obscure aspects of life. Sometimes surreal noir and other times concrete realities, she fashions her stories with a great deal of poetics. As a transgender woman living on the last great frontier of Alaska, she employs many of her experiences in her works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She is the author of ten short stories, an anthologized story, a novella, and a poetry collection. She is most known for her Ms. Mahogany Bones and thaMind Sol-Lady tales.

Egan Millard’s poetry has appeared in Cirque, The Worcester Review, Used Furniture Review, and elsewhere. Originally from New York, he lives in Anchorage, where he is an editor for Alaska Dispatch News. He is the host and founder of The Siren, a poetry and music show in Anchorage.

Susanna J. Mishler was awarded first place in the Poetry Open of the University of Alaska / Anchorage Daily News Statewide Writing Contest in 2001 and the winning poem was published on LitSite Alaska. Since then, her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hotel Amerika, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, RATTLE, and elsewhere. In 2004 she received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she also served as an editor for Sonora Review. She teaches workshops at the 49 Alaska Writing Center. A collection of poems, titled Termination Dust, is available from Boreal Books / Red Hen Press in January 2014.

Kate Partridge received her MFA from George Mason University, and her poems and lyric essays have appeared in Colorado Review, Carolina Quarterly, RHINO, Better: Culture & Lit, and Verse Daily. She lives in Anchorage, where she teaches at the University of Alaska Anchorage, co-edits Gazing Grain Press, and serves as account coordinator for VIDA.

Vivian Faith Prescott is a fifth generation Alaskan, born and raised in Wrangell, Alaska. Vivian is of Sáami, Irish, Suomalainen, and Norwegian descent (among others). She lives in Sitka and part-time in Wrangell at her family’s fish camp. Vivian has an MFA from the University of Alaska and a PhD in Cross Cultural Studies. She’s the author of a full-length poetry collection The Hide of My Tongue and two chapbooks: Slick and Sludge. Her linked story collection is forthcoming from Boreal Books. Vivian’s poetry has appeared in the North American Review, Drunken Boat, Yellow Medicine Review, and Cirque as well as other journals. She was recently awarded a Rasmuson Fellow in poetry for 2015–2016. Vivian is a co–founding member of the Blue Canoe Writers, a multicultural writers’ group in Sitka, Alaska, and she co-facilitates a teen writers’ group at Mt. Edgecumbe High School.

Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of twenty books and plays. His eighth book of poems, Talking with the Radio: poems inspired by jazz and popular music, was published in 2015 by Kattywompus Press. He is also writing a series of plays about authors, incorporating their writing into the action. The most recent of these, Colette: A One-Woman Show, had its first staged reading at the Millennium Stage of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in February 2015. He is the editor of an anthology of poetry of the United States, The Face of Poetry, from the University of California Press. Currently, he teaches in the low-residency MFA in writing program at the University of Alaska Anchorage and serves as poetry editor of Catamaran Literary Reader.

Dawnell Smith works in a cubicle by day, a shared desk pod / family room at night, where she crafts columns, reviews, and articles for daily and weekly newspapers, quarterly magazines, blogs, and other digital chalkboards. When not on quad skates, working on art projects, running errands, and getting outside, she makes essays, poems, short stories, and other mixed-genre pieces. She won a Rasmuson Fellowship in 2015, and she is currently working on a collaborative memoir and video/audio project with her partner, Teeka Ballas. She lives in Anchorage with her partner, teenage boys, rescue dogs, crickets, renegade shrews, and lone gecko. (She feels bad about the gecko; it’s cold and the tank seems limiting.) Her derby name is WickedSpeedia.

Teresa Sundmark lives in Homer, Alaska. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from UAA. Her poetry and fiction have been featured in Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim, and her essays have been syndicated through High Country News. In 2011, she was the winner of the Nicole Blizzard Short Story Contest. Teresa works in a public library and teaches for the Kachemak Bay Branch of the Kenai Peninsula College. She blogs about writing, small-town life, and various other subjects at loftyminded.com.

Amber Flora Thomas is the recipient of several major poetry awards, including the Dylan Thomas American Poet Prize, Richard Peterson Prize, and Ann Stanford Prize. Her published work includes: Eye of Water: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and The Rabbits Could Sing: Poems (University of Alaska Press, 2012). Most recently, her poetry has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Saranac Review, and Crab Orchard Review, as well as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and numerous other journals and anthologies. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the East Carolina University. She was born and raised in northern California.

Leslie Kimiko Ward is the recipient of a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum for her forthcoming memoir 1000 Cranes. She has written and performed a thirty-minute monologue and one-woman-show based on similar content. Her first short story was published nearly fifteen years ago, in an anthology of lesbian erotic short fiction. She is a Creative Writing MFA dropout, with little understanding of the term exegesis. Leslie would like to thank her writing mentor, novelist Jo-Ann Mapson, for her stalwart advice and encouragement.

Shelby “Mahogany” Wilson has been in Alaska for over 20 years. She is the vice president of Black Feather POETS Alaska. Black Feather POETS is a nonprofit organization built on bringing cultures together through art. Shelby is a published poet who started her poetic venture with Alaska Poetry League. In 2005, she was fourth runner-up in the Alaska Poetry Slam contest. Since then Shelby has expanded her creative talents to include performance poet, workshop facilitator, writer, spiritual counselor, and motivational speaker. Her work has appeared online in Daily Love, Vox Poetica, Fib Review, Eskimo Pie, Poetry from Wherever, Poetic Medicine, Moon Magazine, and Bent Alaska. Her print work has appeared in Safire Magazine, Alaska Women Speak, and in the anthology In My Lifetime: Wonders. Shelby produced and appeared on a spoken-word CD entitled Lyrical Finesse, a Black Feather Production. She has self-published a chapbook titled Serenity, and the poetry collections Broken Wings, Mending Damaged Souls and Verbal Stimulation, An Intimate Collection of Poetry.