This happened on December 15, 2020. Watch the recording on YouTube.

Enjoy the celebratory, live launch of Tom Kizzia’s The Wake of the Unseen Object - Travels through Alaska's Native Landscapes, newly re-published by University of Alaska Press in their Classic Reprint Series. Series editor Eric Heyne will join the author for this reading, discussion, and Q&A.

A journey to Alaska’s remote roadless villages, during a time of great historical transition, brings us this enduring portrait of a place and its people. Alutiiq, Yup’ik, Inupiaq, and Athabascan subjects reveal themselves as entirely contemporary individuals with deep longings and connection to the land and to their past.

Tom Kizzia’s account of his travels off the Alaska road system, first published in 1991, has endured with a sterling reputation for its thoughtful, poetic, unflinching engagement with the complexity of Alaska’s rural communities. The Wake of the Unseen Object is now considered some of the finest nonfiction writing about Alaska.

This new edition includes an updated introduction by the author, looking at what remains the same after thirty years and what is different—both in Alaska, and in the expectations placed on a reporter visiting from another world.

Tom Kizzia is the author of the New York Times bestseller Pilgrim’s Wilderness. His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker and Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017. He traveled widely in rural Alaska as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News.