Who are we?
Jeremy Pataky
Publisher
Jeremy Pataky is the author of Overwinter, published by University of Alaska Press in the Alaska Literary Series. His poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Terrain.org, The Southeast Review, Cirque, Camas, Ice Floe, Left-Facing Bird, Anchorage Press, Chatter Marks, and many other journals and anthologies. Jeremy earned an MFA at the University of Montana. He is co-publisher and co-editor of Edible Alaska magazine, and helped staff Bellingham Review and CutBank literary journals in the past. For ten years, he served Alaska’s literary community through various roles with 49 Writers, a literary nonprofit in the 49th state, first as a founding board member and then as its longest-running executive director. Earlier, he worked as a guide in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and then as executive director of the Wrangell Mountains Center. A settler on Ahtna Nenn' and Dena’ina Ełnena lands, he splits his time between McCarthy and Anchorage, Alaska.
John Messick
Compass Lines
John Messick is a writer, teacher, husband, and father. His work has appeared in news outlets and literary journals, including Rock & Sling, Tampa Review, Nowhere Magazine, The Miami Herald, Anchorage Daily News, and more. John earned his MFA at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and has been awarded the 2013 AWP Intro Journals Prize in nonfiction and a 2022 Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award. He teaches composition at Kenai Peninsula College in Soldotna, Alaska. Compass Lines is his first book.
Tom Kizzia
Cold Mountain Path
Tom Kizzia, who has a cabin along the Nizina River near McCarthy, traveled widely in rural Alaska as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, as well as in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017 and The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change. His book Pilgrim’s Wilderness, published by Crown/Random House, was a New York Times bestseller and #5 in the top 10 Best Books of 2013 as chosen by Amazon. His first book, The Wake of the Unseen Object, is was reissued in 2020 by University of Alaska Press as part of its Classic Reprint Series. It was originally published by Henry Holt and was named one of the best all-time nonfiction books about Alaska by the state historical society. Tom received an Artist Fellowship from Rasmuson Foundation in 2017. He is a former Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and a graduate of Hampshire College. His newspaper stories about the Pilgrim Family won a President's Award from McClatchy Newspapers. Tom lives year-round in Homer, Alaska.
Corinna Cook
Distance Over Light
forthcoming Winter 2023
Corinna Cook’s debut book of lyric essays, Leavetakings, was published by University of Alaska Press in the Alaska Literary Series in November 2020. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Missouri and specializes in the theory, history, and craft of creative writing; contemporary Indigenous literature; and circumpolar Indigenous cinema. She writes across literary and academic modes to explore cross-cultural questions. Her creative work appears in Flyway, The Ocean State Review, Alaska Magazine, Edible Alaska, and elsewhere; her freelancing appears in Rasmuson Foundation and 49 Writers’ Artists of Alaska series and in Yukon North of Ordinary; and her critical articles appear in Assay and in New Writing. Supported by a 2020 Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award, a 2018-19 Fulbright Fellowship, and a 2018 Alaska Literary Award, Corinna’s current full-length work in progress explores Alaska-Yukon art, ecology, and colonial history.