New issue of 'Alaska Quarterly Review' now available

The Spring and Summer 2009 issue of UAA's Alaska Quarterly Review (AQR) is now available. This new issue fiction section is made up of 13 powerful, new short stories and a compelling nonfiction section lead by a poignant and insightful essay by Alaska State Writer, Nancy Lord.

The issue's special section features new and selected poems by carver and poet Robert Davis Hoffman, a Tlingit from Southeast Alaska.

Robert Davis Hoffman is a poet fully engaged in his heritage and culture. He describes the creative impulse for his poetry and carving this way: "My desire to create comes from a drive to connect my past to the present, stated in my poem Saginaw Bay: '...I keep going back, I keep trying to see myself against all this history...' When I create new forms out of the old, using nontraditional materials and styles, I bridge the past and the present. Our ancestors knew there were spirits in everything; they spoke to places, they thanked the cedar, they spoke to the creatures, they spoke to their tools. My art contains my 'thought conversations.' But the materials already possessed their inherent power. My job as an artist is simply to rearrange what is, just as re-telling is the job of the storyteller. As I am creating, I am merely re-creating."

Alaska Quarterly Review is one of America's premier literary magazines and is produced at UAA. It features outstanding fiction, short plays, poetry and literary nonfiction. Deemed by The Washington Post Book World as "one of the nation's best literary magazines," and "fresh treasure" in The New York Times Book Review, AQR has received numerous awards and recognition, including the Alaska Governor's Award for the Arts.

AQR also regularly co-sponsors readings and workshops with outstanding writers and poets from around the country. To find out more about these events or about the Alaska Quarterly Review, visit the Web site.