front cover of The Little Seal
The Little Seal
An Alaska Adventure
Ram Papish
University of Alaska Press, 2009

The northern fur seal spends most of its life in the open ocean of the North Pacific, from California up through Alaska and down to Japan. These seals travel hundreds of miles, farther than any other seal or sea lion, to reach their remote breeding grounds. Most fur seals go to the Pribilof Islands of Alaska, where, historically, several million fur seals converged annually, but the population counted in the Pribilofs in 2008 was less than one million and dropping rapidly. Ram Papish’s richly illustrated story follows these magnificent—and increasingly vulnerable—creatures through the most important part of their lives.

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Ends of the Earth
Poems
Kate Partridge
University of Alaska Press, 2017
Ends of the Earth uses the landscape of Alaska as a testing ground for love and elegy. It is a poetry collection that contains both lyric responses to the urban Alaska environment and extended sequences that cycle between autobiography, mythic allusion, and the literary archive. In her work, Kate Partridge combines the fresh perspective of a newcomer with explorations of the landscape and lifestyles through allusions to classic literature.

While the poems turn an inquisitive, contemporary lens to the subject of Alaska, elements throughout the book are influenced by twentieth-century writers like Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. The manuscript also combines personal experience with collaged material from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Walt Whitman's notebooks, and other classic sources, to investigate the ideas of love, isolation, and location. Through humor and observation, Partridge takes a new look at what it means to live in urban Alaska and the world at large.
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Overwinter
Jeremy Pataky
University of Alaska Press, 2015
A debut collection from an exciting new voice in Alaska poetry, Overwinter reconciles the natural quiet of wilderness with the clamor of built environments. Jeremy Pataky’s migration between Anchorage and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park inspires these poems that connect urban to rural. This duality permeates Overwinter. Moments are at turns fevered or serene. The familial and romantic are measured against the wildness of the Far North. Empty spaces bring both solace and loneliness in full. Past loves haunt the present, surviving in the spaces sculpted by language.
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Little Whale
A Story of the Last Tlingit War Canoe
Roy Peratrovich, Jr.
University of Alaska Press, 2016
Keet, a ten-year-old Tlingit Indian boy, stows away for a voyage on his father’s canoe . . . and soon finds himself caught in the middle of a wild seastorm. The story carries him far from his home village, and when he makes land, he winds up right in the middle of a dangerous dispute between two Indian clans. The story of how he copes with these surprises and extricates himself from danger is dramatic and unforgettable.
            And it’s mostly true. Roy Peratrovich here builds a wonderful children’s tale on the bones of a story his own grandfather passed down. His accompanying illustrations bring the people and landscapes of Alaska—to say nothing of the adventures!—to stunning life, drawing young readers into a long-gone time when the whims of nature and man could suddenly test a boy’s courage.
 
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Exploring and Mapping Alaska
The Russian America Era, 1741-1867
Alexey Postnikov
University of Alaska Press, 2015
Russia first encountered Alaska in 1741 as part of the most ambitious and expensive expedition of the entire eighteenth century. For centuries since, cartographers have struggled to define and develop the enormous region comprising northeastern Asia, the North Pacific, and Alaska. The forces of nature and the follies of human error conspired to make the area incredibly difficult to map.
Exploring and Mapping Alaska focuses on this foundational period in Arctic cartography.  Russia spurred a golden era of cartographic exploration, while shrouding their efforts in a veil of secrecy. They drew both on old systems developed by early fur traders and new methodologies created in Europe. With Great Britain, France, and Spain following close behind, their expeditions led to an astounding increase in the world’s knowledge of North America.
Through engrossing descriptions of the explorations and expert navigators, aided by informative illustrations, readers can clearly trace the evolution of the maps of the era, watching as a once-mysterious region came into sharper focus. The result of years of cross-continental research, Exploring and Mapping Alaska is a fascinating study of the trials and triumphs of one of the last great eras of historic mapmaking.
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The Secret Life of a Black Aspie
A Memoir
Anand Prahlad
University of Alaska Press, 2017
Anand Prahlad was born on a former plantation in Virginia in 1954. This memoir, vividly internal, powerfully lyric, and brilliantly impressionistic, is his story.
 
For the first four years of his life, Prahlad didn’t speak. But his silence didn’t stop him from communicating—or communing—with the strange, numinous world he found around him. Ordinary household objects came to life; the spirits of long-dead slave children were his best friends. In his magical interior world, sensory experiences blurred, time disappeared, and memory was fluid. Ever so slowly, he emerged, learning to talk and evolving into an artist and educator. His journey takes readers across the United States during one of its most turbulent moments, and Prahlad experiences it all, from the heights of the Civil Rights Movement to West Coast hippie enclaves to a college town that continues to struggle with racism and its border state legacy.
 
Rooted in black folklore and cultural ambience, and offering new perspectives on autism and more, The Secret Life of a Black Aspie will inspire and delight readers and deepen our understanding of the marginal spaces of human existence.
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Cabin Stories
The Best of Dark Winter Nights: True Stories from Alaska
Rob Prince
University of Alaska Press, 2022
Cabin Stories: The Best of Dark Winter Nights: True Stories from Alaska is a collection of favorite stories selected by the executive producers of the hit live event, radio show, and podcast Dark Winter Nights. These hilarious, heartwarming, and riveting stories depict true adventures, impossible situations, and the stranger side of life in Alaska—falling through ice, surviving a plane crash, living through a shipwreck in a hurricane, discovering a bear trapped in a woman’s front entryway, finding a pet goose frozen to a porch in a pile of its own poop, and more—as told by the everyday Alaskans who experienced them.
 
From the humorous to the heart-wrenching, these are the stories told up north on dark winter nights. Anyone curious about what living in Alaska is really like will appreciate this wild and fun anthology.
 
 
Contributors: Glenner Anderson, Kat Betters, Randy Brown, Melissa Buchta, JB Carnahan, Philip Charette, Roy Churchwell, Richard Coleman, Michael Daku, Wendy Demers, Alexandra Dunlap, Alyssa Enriquez, Jan Hanscom, Mike Hopper, James Mennaker, Ken Moore, Steve Neumeth, Kaiti Ott, Lori Schoening, Bill Schnabel, Guy Schroder, Ed Shirk, Eric Stevens, Chris Zwolinski
 
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