Library celebrates Alaska Book Week with reading
Alaska Book Week celebrates Alaskan authors and books, and the Homer Public Library celebrates with a group reading organized by McKibben Jackinsky and Bill Richardson at 5:30 p.m. today, Oct. 11, in the Fireside Reading Room.
“Meet the Authors” has been visiting community libraries and gift shops across the Kenai Peninsula to present their work.
The organizers said they hope to provide a greater awareness of local authors, and to highlight the wide spectrum of each author’s subject matter: autobiographies, Alaska adventures, African living, Bush teaching adventures, survival stories, surviving leukemia, drug addiction, and more.
In Homer the authors in attendance will be Doug Dodd, George Harbeson, Mike Chihuly, Mary Perry, Bill Richardson, and Joyce Porte. The authors will read from their books and share insights on their writing lives.
UAA writing director reads
University of Alaska Anchorage professor of creative writing David Stevenson does a public reading of his new work at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 12, at the Kachemak Bay Campus commons. Also the director of the UAA master of fine arts program, Stevenson does a workshop from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the college; the fee is $40.
In his workshop, “Reading and Writing the Inscrutable” Stevenson focuses on readings and discussions of works by Denis Johnson, James Tate and Joy William and balances that with writing exercises reflecting with making beauty over making meaning. Register for the workshop by today, Oct. 11.
Stevenson has been the book review editor of the American Alpine Journal since 1995. His fiction collection, “Letters from Chamonix,” won the Banff Mountain Book Award for Fiction and Poetry in 2014. His collected mountaineering essays, “Warnings Against Myself: Meditations on a Life in Climbing,” was published in 2016. He received the H. Adams Carter Literary Award from the American Alpine Club in 2017.
Two of his essays have been marked as Notable in the The Best American Essays Series, including “A Late and Uninvited Correspondent Responds to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets” in the 2017 edition.
