Alumni Profile: Elizabeth Bradfield, MFA Creative Writing '05

Elizabeth Bradfield can pluck a poem out of thin air.

Listen to a podcast of Elizabeth reading from her books and check out a short video on Youtube from her reading at UAA on March 3.

Sometimes she'll hear something that catches her attention like someone has struck a tuning fork. Sometimes it's something bizarre someone said, or even just some interesting thing she sees on the street that will ring true and she instantly starts thinking about why it resonates. Then she uses her special skill with words until it echoes in the pure form of a poem. She says her personal entry to the poems she writes may also come from a variety of other places like reading other poems or literature. But it's those things that make her pause and think, what's different about that?

She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Washington and received an MFA in poetry from UAA. Although she chose Anchorage for graduate school because it was close to the water, she says that it ended up being a perfect match in terms of the academic and intellectual challenge provided by her professors and peers. Bradfield grew up in Tacoma, Washington where her father is very into boating and her mother is a voracious reader, both of which influenced her greatly. She is constantly drawn to water and writing like wind into a sail, and it has led her to where she is today.

She lives on Cape Cod and best describes what she does on her LinkedIn profile: "I work in a few fields and enjoy finding bridges between them: Web designer, naturalist, poet, teacher, publisher. The worlds of writing (poetry, teaching, publishing) and natural history, of all things on the list, are the most dynamic pair. One fuels the other, comments on the other, drives the other. It's my goal to continue to find ways to integrate the two." As a naturalist she is away for months at a time, usually out on boats. Places she visits often are Baja, the Eastern Canadian Arctic and Southeast Alaska.

Bradfield's poetry has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Believer, Orion, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded fellowships and scholarships from Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Vermont Studio Center and elsewhere.

Bradfield is the author of Interpretive Work, which won the Audre Lorde Award and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and Approaching Ice, a book of poems about Arctic and Antarctic exploration that was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.

In 2005, Bradfield founded Broadsided, which she still runs. Her Web site describes it as: "A grassroots, virtual, collaborative press, Broadsided attempts to pull literary work out of journals and put it on the streets. It brings words together with the energy of original visual art, publishing monthly collaborations on the Web site as PDFs that are then downloaded, printed and posted around the world by 'Vectors.'"

She recently revisited UAA to give a public poetry reading and a private brown bag event with current MFA poetry students. As someone who has gone through the program and achieved success in getting her work published, Bradfield has a lot of wisdom to share. Like many students, she didn't take a straight path from childhood dreaming to her current career.

At age 18 she had it in her head that she would pursue her studies to be an architect but couldn't get in a drawing class right away. It was in an English course that she got introduced to different ways of revising and became intrigued with the craft of writing. She found it "very appealing to try to craft that thing on the page." After her undergraduate experience, she thought she would be an English teacher, but decided to spend a little time on boats first and went to work as a deckhand.

Later she took a job as a dot com editor. But her heart longed for adventure and the open water. As a temporary substitute to being on the water herself, she picked up a book about polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, which totally drew her in and left her wanting to read more. And read more she did, until her mind was swimming with the exploits of so many Arctic and Antarctic explorers she realized she needed to express those thoughts through her poetry. The result is her latest book, Approaching Ice.

Karla Huston's review of Bradfield's book for The Library Journal states, "She writes with humanity about those who were arguably a bit mad, showing sympathy for the explorers, the creatures they encountered and the families they left behind. Highly recommended for anyone who reads contemporary poetry."