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AQR YOUTUBE LIVE READING EVENTS
Poetry Reading: Jamaica Baldwin, Farah Peterson, Jamella Hagen
Jamaica Baldwin is the author of the poetry collection, Bone Language, was published by YesYes Books in June 2023. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Guernica, World Literature Today, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and The Missouri Review. She is the recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a RHINO Poetry editor's prize, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, as well as the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Contest Poetry Award. Her writing has been supported by Aspen Words, Storyknife, Hedgebrook, Furious Flower, and the Jack Straw Writers program. Of Baldwin’s debut collection, Kwame Dawes said this: “It contains a lament for the inadequacy of dreams in our world. Yet hope is found in her beautiful writing and deeply sophisticated thinking. Her language is spare and her many voices communicate with an arresting strangeness that is at once elegant and disquieting. … a fully-formed and extremely important poet.”
Farah Peterson is an essayist and poet. Her essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, and The Atlantic and her work has been collected in The Best American Magazine Writing. Her nonfiction, including personal essays, art criticism, and social commentary, has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The American Scholar, The Best American Magazine Writing, The Threepenny Review, and The Atlantic. Her works were selected as Notable Essays in the Best American Essays in 2018 and 2022, and she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 2021. Her scholarship on statutory interpretation and constitutional law has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review.
Jamella Hagen is the author of the poetry collection, Kerosene, published by Nightwood Editions. In addition to Alaska Quarterly Review her poems have been published in Canadian Literature, The Globe and Mail, Ploughshares, Arc, Event and The Malahat Review as well as in the anthologies Unfurled: Collected Poetry from Northern BC Women: New and Selected Poems and The Best Canadian Poetry in English. Her work has won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. A Canadian, Jamella lives on the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. Of her collection, Harbor Publishing observed: "Hagen has mastered the trick of animating fleeting moments with an elegant touch that evokes both familiarity and wonder."
Martha Silano Poetry Reading
Martha Silano has authored five poetry books, including Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019), The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award finalist, and Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books, 2014). She also co-authored, with Kelli Russell Agodon, of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice. In addition to AQR, Martha's poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Paris Review, AGNI, North American Review, American Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review Online, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Mississippi Review. Her poem "Love" appears in The Best American Poetry 2009. Martha teaches at Bellevue College.
WAYS of KNOWING: Poetry, Science, and the Environment
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the University of Alaska Anchorage/Alaska Pacific University Consortium Library and co-sponsored by the Alaska Quarterly Review, keynote featured poet Jane Hirshfield joins a distinguished panel of Alaskans to consider "Ways of Knowing: Poetry, Science, and the Environment.” The panelists are Jane Hirshfield, Stephanie Holthaus (Climate Action Advisor for The Nature Conservancy Alaska and founder of the Women on Climate Initiative of TNC North America), Nancy Lord (Former Alaska Writer Laureate, Homer), and Marie Tozier (Iñupiaq poet, Nome).
Jane Hirshfield reads from The Asking
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the University of Alaska Anchorage/Alaska Pacific University Consortium Library and co-sponsored by the Alaska Quarterly Review, Jane Hirshfield reads from her new and selected collection of poems. The Asking (Knopf 2023). The event was hosted by the Anchorage Museum. JANE HIRSHFIELD is the author of ten collections of poetry and two now-classic collections of essays on poetry’s deep workings, and the editor of four co-translated books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns about the biosphere and interconnection. She is has written “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine) and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and from the Academy of American Poets; the Poetry Center Book Award and the California Book Award; her books have been long- and finalist-listed for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Her work, translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019. Jane Hirshfield is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.
Debbie Urbanski reads from her novel: AFTER WORLD recently published by Simon & Shuster.
“Like all great novels in any genre,” Urban Waite wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle ‘After World’ spills out, reflects and, through a kaleidoscope of sources and observations, invites the reader into a place that is more than the words on a page (or a screen) but becomes, in its own way, a conversation between human and AI, reader and writer, beginning and end.” “This inventive love story,” Dana Dunham wrote in Scientific American “is meticulously experimental with time and structure. ”And as Kirkus Reviews observed, a “deeply moving story of grief and love.” In addition to Alaska Quarterly Review, Urbanski's writing has also appeared in The Sun, Granta, Terrain.org Kenyon Review, Orion, Utne Reader, Nature, Terraform, Conjunctions, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and The Best American Experimental Writing. Her writing has also been named a notable essay or distinguished story in Best American Science and Nature Writing; Best American Short Stories; Best American Essays (twice); Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (four times); and Best American Mystery Stories. One of her stories has also been a Pushcart Prize special mention. Urbanski was a 2019 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award for emerging women writers of exceptional promise.
Jessica Powell Reads Her Short Story “Object Conversation.”
Jessica Powell reads her short story "Object Conversion" from AQR Vol. 40 1-2 (2024). She is the author of The Big Disruption: A Totally Fictional but Essentially True Silicon Valley Story. The first novel ever published by the digital platform Medium, The Big Disruption was published as a paperback and ebook following its huge success on Medium. The New York Times described the novel as "A zany satire [whose] diagnosis of Silicon Valley's cultural stagnancy is so spot on that it's barely contestable." And Kara Swisher, an editor-at-large at New York Magazine said this: "Jessica Powell is everything you want in a writer about power and money and lunacy in modern day Silicon Valley. She is an insider who has come outside. Such a view has never been more important as tech's damage becomes more and more clear." In addition to AQR, Powell’s fiction and non-fiction have been published in TIME, The New York Times, VICE, WIRED, Fast Company, The Guardian and elsewhere. She is also the author of a nonfiction book Literary Paris. Jessica Powell was the former Vice President of Communications for Google and served on the company's management team and she is currently the co-founder and CEO of AudioShake, an A.I. startup to help make audio more accessible and interactive.
(Streamed live on Feb 16, 2022 )Two of America’s most esteemed poets, Jane Hirshfield and Dorianne Laux, discuss two of their poems that emerged from the same factual source and their craft approach to writing those poems. The conversation includes a larger discussion of craft about writing from newspapers and other facts. One of Dorianne’s books is Facts About the Moon, and Jane has other poems that have emerged from The New York Times science or news articles. Jane is also the curator of the Poets for Science exhibition.
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Produced for Alaska Quarterly Review's 35th anniversary celebration by AQR editor, Ronald Spatz, Shaawatke’é’s Birth is the film version, in Tlingit and English, of a poem published Alaska Quarterly Review by Emily Wall and X'unei Lance Twitchell. "Shaawatke’é’s Birth" is about the birth of a Tlingit child as well as an origin story. It is ultimately a story about how important language is to sustaining a culture and cultural identity. A grant from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and an in-kind match from the Anchorage Museum supported the film's alignment with Anchorage School District curriculum for use in classroom.