Biography
Eva Saulitis has taught English and creative writing at the Kachemak Bay branch of Kenai Peninsula College, in Homer, Alaska, since 1999 and is also on the faculty of the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. Trained initially as a marine biologist, she received her M.S. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1993. Since 1986, she has studied the killer whales of Prince William Sound, Kenai Fjords and the Aleutian Islands and is the author and co-author of numerous scientific publications. Dissatisfied with the objective language and rigid methodology of science, she turned to creative writing—poetry and the essay—to develop another language with which to address the natural world, receiving her MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1996. Her essay collection, Leaving Resurrection, was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Non-Fiction Prize, and was published by Boreal Books/Red Hen Press in 2008. Her essays and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Northwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Carnet de Route, Seattle Review, Ice-Floe, Connotations and Kalliope. They have also appeared in several anthologies, including Homeground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez; she has read essays she contributed to that volume on the PBS radio series Living on Earth. She’s been a recipient of fellowships from the Island Institute, the Alaska State Council on the Arts (Connie Boochever Fellowship), and the Rasmuson Foundation. In 2007, with the help of grants from Rasmuson Foundation and Ventspils House, an international center for writers and translators, she spent a month in Latvia, her parents’ birthplace, where she began a new book of lyric essays and completed a poetry collection entitled Many Ways to Say It.
|
