Sheila Bunker Nickerson (born 1942) is an American poet and writer. She served as poet laureate of Alaska and was twice awarded the Pushcart Prize. Much of her writing focuses on Alaska, nature, and arctic exploration.
Nickerson was born in 1942 in New York City. [1] She is the eldest of three children of Charles Cantine Bunker and Mavis Bunker (née McGuire), [1] and the great niece of diplomat Ellsworth Bunker.
After attending the Chapin School, she went on to Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in English. She also received a Ph.D. in creative writing from the Union Institute and University. She previously lived in Juneau, Alaska, and currently lives in Bellingham, Washington.
Nickerson was named poet laureate of Alaska in 1977. [2] She served as writer-in-residence for the State of Alaska Artists-in-the-Schools program, was writer-in-residence at the Alaska State Library, and was co-founder of University Within Walls, a statewide prison education program. She was also editor of Alaska's Wildlife, a magazine published by the State of Alaska Department of Fish & Game.
Nickerson's poems and essays have been published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. In 1976, she was awarded the Pushcart Prize for the poem "The Song of the Soapstone Carver". [3] In 1986, she was again awarded the Pushcart Prize for the poem "Kodiak Widow". [4]
Her 1996 nonfiction work Disappearance: A Map, is part personal memoir about the loss of a colleague and part nonfiction account of disappearances in Alaska, including Franklin's lost expedition in 1845, polar expeditions of Captain Bob Bartlett and Vilhjalmur Stefansson and more recent vanishings such as those of U.S. Congressmen Nick Begich and Hale Boggs. [5] [6] Nickerson discussed disappearances in Alaska in the "Alaska's Bermuda Triangle" episode of The History Channel's History's Mysteries series. [7]
In 2001 Nickerson was a Harriman scholar participating in The Harriman Expedition Retraced, [8] [9] a voyage sponsored by Smith College and the Public Broadcasting Service following the itinerary of the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899. She was interviewed in a 2-hour PBS documentary film about the 2001 expedition. [10]
Poetry
Fiction
Nonfiction
Lia Purpura is an American poet, writer and educator. She is the author of four collections of poems, four collections of essays and one collection of translations. Her poems and essays appear in AGNI, The Antioch Review, DoubleTake, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Orion Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares. Southern Review, and many other magazines.
The Alaska Quarterly Review is a biannual literary journal founded in 1980 by Ronald Spatz and James Liszka at the University of Alaska Anchorage and continued unaffiliated in 2020. Ronald Spatz serves as editor-in-chief. It was deemed by the Washington Post "Book World" to be "one of the nation's best literary magazines." A number of works originally published in The Alaska Quarterly Review have been subsequently selected for inclusion in The Best American Essays, The Best American Poetry, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best Creative Nonfiction, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Beacon Best, and The Pushcart Prize: The Best of the Small Presses.
Joseph Millar is an American poet. He was raised in western Pennsylvania and after an adult life spent mostly in the SF Bay Area and the Northwest, he divides his time between Raleigh, NC and Richmond, CA.
Kay Ryan is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. From 2008 to 2010 she was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate. In 2011 she was named a MacArthur Fellow and she won the Pulitzer Prize.
Nora Marks Keixwnéi Dauenhauer was a Tlingit poet, short-story writer, and Tlingit language scholar from Alaska. She won an American Book Award for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804. Nora was Alaska State Writer Laureate from 2012 - 2014.
Ellen Bryant Voigt is an American poet. She served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont.
Marilyn Nelson is an American poet, translator, biographer, and children's book author. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and the former Poet Laureate of Connecticut. She is a winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Frost Medal. From 1978 to 1994, she published under the name Marilyn Nelson Waniek. She is the author or translator of more than twenty books and five chapbooks of poetry for adults and children. While most of her work deals with historical subjects, in 2014 she published a memoir, named one of NPR's Best Books of 2014, entitled How I Discovered Poetry.
Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.
Rebecca Seiferle is an American poet.
Margaret Gibson is an American poet.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is an American poet, essayist and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and currently Regents Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Adrian Blevins is an American poet. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the 2016 Wilder Prize. Her other full-length poetry collections are Status Pending, Live from the Homesick Jamboree and The Brass Girl Brouhaha. With Karen McElmurray, Blevins co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia, a collection of essays of new and emerging Appalachian poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers. Her chapbooks are Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, which won the first of Bright Hill Press's chapbook contests..
Nancy K. Pearson is an American poet. She is the author of The Whole by Contemplation of a Single Bone and Two Minutes of Light.
Kelly Cherry was an American novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Kesler Edward "Kes" Woodward is an American artist, art historian and curator. Known for his colorful paintings of northern landscapes, he was awarded the first Alaska Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts in 2004. Woodward has also written extensively on the Art of the circumpolar North and has curated exhibitions which have toured Alaska, California, Oregon, Washington, and Georgia.
Debra Marquart is an American poet and musician from the small town of Napoleon, North Dakota. Since 1992 she has been performing as singer-songwriter with the band The Bone People. After graduating with master's degrees from Moorhead State University and Iowa State University (ISU), she became an English professor at ISU, directing an MFA program in "creative writing and environment". In 2014, she taught writers' workshops in Bakken oil field communities most affected by hydraulic fracking, where "many people ... are despairing – feeling that they have been declared an energy sacrifice zone." She is the Poet Laureate of Iowa since 2019. In 2021 she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
Lauren Camp is an Arab American poet. As New Mexico Poet Laureate, she has been honored with a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. In 2022, she was selected as Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park.
Julia Shalett Vinograd was a poet. She is well known as "The Bubble Lady" to the Telegraph Avenue community of Berkeley, California, a moniker she gained from blowing bubbles at the People's Park demonstrations in 1969. Vinograd is depicted blowing bubbles in the People's Park Mural off of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.
The Poet Laureate of Alaska also known as Alaska State Writer Laureate is the poet laureate for the U.S. state of Alaska. The first Alaska Poet Laureate, Margaret Mielke, was appointed in 1963. The program expanded to include other kinds of writers in 1996.