coming soon • March 25 • coming soon

STILL NORTH
READING AND PERFORMANCE SERIES
presents

Mickey and the Lost Bear
Drink Till You Think

Thursday March 25th
8:30 pm at Tap Root Cafe
1330 Huffman Road
Anchorage, AK

A celebratory night of spoken word, live hip hop,
electric violin and keyboard, tasty brew,
and arts & crafts featuring:

Mickey Kenny
MC Kompass

DJ ROAM
& guests

February 5, 2010

Olena Kalytiak Davis & Kary Wayson

photo by Jessica Speed

photo by Jamie Lang


photo by Jamie Lang


photo by Kayla Spaan



Thanks to those who helped realize Still North #2:
Alaska Center for the Book, Anchorage Community Land Trust, Alaska Poetry League, Bruce Farnsworth, Craig Updegrove, Jamie & Jonathan Lang, Jimmy Riordan, Kayla Spaan, Lila Vogt, MTS Gallery, Rabbit Rabbit Press, Trailer Art Center. Thanks, Olena Kalytiak Davis and Kary Wayson.

with thanks, too, to David Foster Wallace

photo Kayla Spaan

coming soon • February 5 • coming soon

STILL NORTH
READING AND PERFORMANCE SERIES
presents

Parque?

an evening of live poetry by
Olena Kalytiak Davis
& Kary Wayson

in collaboration with
Rabbit Rabbit Press
&
MTS Gallery
3142 Mountain View Drive
Anchorage, Alaska

Please Join Us on First Friday, February 5th

From 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Reading at 8:00 PM Sharp!

Catering by CRUSH

Music by Reverse Retro

about the poets...

Olena Kalytiak Davis is the author of three poetry collections, most recently a chapbook called On the Kitchen Table From Which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed, as well as Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, And Other Off-And-Back Handed Importunities. Her first book, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing, won the Brittingham Prize. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award in poetry, and grants from the Rasmuson Foundation. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals and magazines including AGNI, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Michigan Quarterly Review, Field, Indiana Review, and in anthologies including Best American Poetry 1995 and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. She is a first-generation Ukrainian-American, and grew up in Detroit. She has since lived in San Francisco, Prague, Lviv, Paris, Chicago, and Bethel, Alaska, and currently lives in Anchorage.

Kary Wayson's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Nation, The Journal, FIELD, Filter, The Best American Poetry 2007, and the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology. Kary was a 2003 Discovery/The Nation award winner, and her chapbook, Dog & Me, was published in 2004 by LitRag Press. Her first full collection, American Husband, won the 2009 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in poetry, and her poem “Lives of Artists” won the 2009 Crazyhorse/ Linda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize. She lives in Seattle.

~

Sponsored By

Trailer Art Center

Anchorage Community Land Trust

Alaska State Council on the Arts

Alaska Poetry league

Alaska Center For The Book

questions: stillnorthseries@gmail.com

April 9, 2009

Cathy Rexford & dg okpik

Cathy Tagnak Rexford at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art

I am a cedar mask, devouring my own tongue,
I close the space between my teeth with permafrost.
From this I will heave forth the Brooks Range,
leech my ears into the shape of whale flukes,
mount my face to the white wall
of a gallery.

~

dg nanouk okpik at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art

In realms less traveled with bow heads,
I will settle down to give you this tight bundle of charts
and maps to find me not in unnatural shapes
but in bear grease, in your bowhead counting,
along the sea, in body, in Eucharist, in a seal effigy.

~

~

Tonja Woelber performing a prelude
from Dan Beachy-Quick's A Whaler's Dictionary


Ossie Kairairuak

Thanks to those who enabled Still North #1:

Chelsea Bailey, Camille Conte, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Julie Decker,
Bill Hess, International Gallery of Contemporary Art,
Ossie Kairairuak, Mickey Kenny, Jamie Lang, Susanna Mishler,
Moose's Tooth Brewing Company, Clarke Pelz, Michele Suchland,
Lila Vogt and the Alaska Poetry League, Tonja Woelber

And especially: thank you, Cathy Tagnak Rexford & dg nanouk okpik.

click to enlarge

coming soon • April 9 • coming soon


STILL NORTH
READING AND PERFORMANCE SERIES
commences

with an evening of live poetry by
Cathy Tagnak Rexford
and dg nanouk okpik

Thursday April 9th • 7:30 pm
at the INTERNATIONAL GALLERY OF CONTEMPORARY ART

427 D Street • Anchorage AK

Cathy Tagnak Rexford is Inupiaq, French-German, English and Dutch. Most of Rexford’s work is inspired by the unique view of the Indigenous peoples of Northern Alaska. She has worked extensively in Native education and language efforts as researcher, curriculum developer and graphic designer. Rexford has also worked on contemporary Native theater and film projects as an actor, producer and writer. She holds a BA from the Evergreen State College in Native American Studies and a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment, Oregon Literary Review, Scrimshaw, Fish Head Soup, and others.

~

dg nanouk okpik is an Alaskan Native, Inupiat-Inuit from Anchorage, Alaska. Her family resides in Barrow, Alaska. Okpik earned an AFA in 2004 and a BFA in Creative Writing with honors in 2005 at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2003, she received the Truman Capote Literary Trust Award. Okpik works as a counselor at Santa Fe Indian Boarding School and is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Stonecoast College, University of Southern Maine in Portland. Her work has appeared in Red Ink, Washington Square, Ahani: Indigenous American Poets Anthology, and others.

~

Alaska Natives dg nanouk okpik and Cathy Tagnak Rexford will launch their new book, Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim, 2009, edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke and published by Salt Publishing and released as part of their series Earthworks: Native American Writings. Effigies compiles four chapbooks by four exceptional emerging poets: Alaska Natives dg nanouk okpik and Cathy Tagnak Rexford; and Native Hawaiians Brandy Nalani McDougall and Mahealani Perez-Wendt. Their Pacific Rim relationship invited the opportunity to publish their four chapbooks in one collected volume. Released in Australia and the United Kingdom in February 2009, Effigies will launch in the United States in April.

Rexford and okpik's book launch reading also launches Alaska's newest forum for literary and performance art, Still North Reading & Performance Series, curated by Jeremy Pataky.

Still North is supported, in part, by the Alaska Poetry League, the International Gallery of Contemporary Art, and the Moose's Tooth Brewing Company.