The University of Alaska Press is pleased to announce the release of
 
Crosscurrents North: ALASKANS ON THE ENVIRONMENT
 
edited by Marybeth Holleman and Anne Coray
 
$26.95 / paper     Available  July 1, 2008
 
 
For delivery outside of Alaska please go to:
 
ISBN-13:  978-1-60223-022-4
ISBN-10: 1-60223-022-6
 
In this collection of sixty-one essays and poems, Alaskans express admiration and awe of the landscape and its wild inhabitants. Celebratory, sobering, and thought provoking, these writings also bear witness to the effects of climate change and development. They ponder the irony of the authors’ own impact, an inevitable consequence of living here.
    Contributors to this anthology span the state and include familiar names: John Haines, Nick Jans, Peggy Shumaker, Nancy Lord, and Richard Nelson. There are also new voices like Mike Burwell and Amy Crawford, and Alaska Native writers, including Joan Kane and Howard Luke. All are passionate about their world—a world populated by icons such as whales, wolves, and bears, and a microcosm, significant in its own right, of mushrooms, sand lance, and berries, upon which all depend.
    Beginning with a preface by Bill McKibben and a foreword by late Alaska Governor Jay Hammond, this anthology celebrates the wildness and wonder of the land and raises questions about our relationship with the natural world.
 
Advance Praise for Crosscurrents North

"Crosscurrents North is a beautiful, heart-breaking, and desperately important book. Alaska, the last frontier, may be humanity’s last chance to figure out how to live in a place without wrecking it. Whether Alaskans succeed or fail means the world to each of us, no matter where we live. What the book says—in the measured tones of Native elders, in the wind-scoured words of Alaska’s fine writers, in the blunt speech of trappers and fishers—is this: ‘There are people who love this bountiful, bruised land. Help us defend it. For all time.’"—Kathleen Dean Moore, author of The Pine Island Paradox

"This book is a pleasure. It brings to life in page after page the breathtaking richness and power of life in Alaska. It is full of writing of great beauty, intelligence, and force. And it is, of course, a necessary book. We have become stewards of the last wild places on earth, and a struggle is going on for each of them. We need this book for its urgency and mindfulness, but readers will return to it for the eyes of these writers and the air they give us to breathe."—Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet Laureate, author of Time and Materials

"If the land has the power to teach us—and I believe that it does—then Alaska is the greatest master teacher in North America and this anthology gathers the voices of some of her most eloquent students. Rising from these pages come the powerful creatures of the North; the rocks, creeks, and bays; the crowds and trash; the grief and passion of citizens who’ve been riled up by wildness to speak on behalf of what they love." —Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Writing the Sacred Into the Real

"This is a book of being with the land. From discussions of weather to respect for animal life to Alaska politics, the writer is the instrument through which we measure the range of this place—its abundance and wild beauty on the one hand, its diminishment on the other. Most importantly, it is a book of living organisms, all of whom appear to know more than humans." —Linda Hogan, author of People of the Whale

About the Editors

ANNE CORAY is the author of Bone Strings (Scarlet Tanager Books); several chapbooks, including Soon the Wind (Finishing Line Press); and coauthor of Lake Clark National Park (Alaska Geographic Association). Her poetry has appeared in the Southern Review, Poetry, North American Review, Connecticut Review, The Women’s Review of Books, and several anthologies. She has been a finalist with White Pine Press, Carnegie Mellon, Water Press & Media, and Bright Hill Press. Coray lives at her birthplace on remote Qizhjeh Vena (Lake Clark) in southwest Alaska.

MARYBETH HOLLEMAN'S most recent book is The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost. Her essays, poetry, and articles have appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, including North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Orion, Christian Science Monitor, Ice-Floe, Sierra, Solo, and American Nature Writing. She teaches creative writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Raised in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, she transplanted to Alaska's Chugach Mountains over twenty years ago.

The University of Alaska Press is a nonprofit organization that publishes and distributes nonfiction works about Alaska, the north Pacific Rim, and circumpolar regions. We publish in an expanding range of subject areas, including politics and history, Native languages and cultures, science and natural history, biography and memoir, and original translations. Our readership includes both the scholarly community and the general public. The press is guided by an independent editorial board of scholars and writers with a diverse range of expertise, and is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

To view comprehensive listing of our titles, please visit: www.uaf.edu/uapress.

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Fairbanks, AK  99775-6240