Who are we?
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 lives in McCarthy, Alaska.
Jeremy Pataky
Publisher
Erica Watson
author, Ghosts of Distant Trees
forthcoming late 2025
Erica Watson grew up primarily in the U.S. Southwest, in a National Park Service family. While an undergraduate studying creative writing, women’s studies, and Spanish at the University of Arizona in Tucson, she spent summers in Denali National Park, Alaska, where she eventually settled year round. Erica completed her MFA in creative nonfiction at University of Alaska Anchorage, where she received the Jason Wenger Award for Excellence in Writing. Her work centers climate crisis, community, politics, and land management, and has appeared in regional and national literary journals and magazines. Erica has worked in conservation, tourism, and environmental education, all of which inform her writing.
John Messick
author, 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.
forthcoming early 2026
A 2024 Washington State Artist Trust Fellow, Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of out takes/ glove box (2023), chosen by Eduardo Corral as winner of the 2022 New American Poetry Prize; and co-author of Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024) as well as the interdisciplinary collaboration, with visual artist Carrie DeBacker, Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017). Earlier collections include the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015) and Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011). She is also co-editor of Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses From the Gloomy Northwest (Scablands Books, 2021). Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a Writing Fellowship from Oxford, and a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya has presented her work in Madrid, as part of the Unamuno Author Festival, and at the University of Oxford. Maya serves as Associate Professor for Central Washington University and Affiliate Faculty in Poetry and Nature Writing for the low-residency MFA at Western Colorado University. She lives in the Inland Northwest with her children.
Maya Jewell Zeller
author, Raised by Ferns
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.
Tom Kizzia
author, Cold Mountain Path