From the Desk of Jessica Cherry: Polar Exploration Is for Everyone

Jessica Cherry is a geoscientist, writer, aerial photographer, and commercial airplane pilot living in Anchorage, Alaska. She wrote a literary column for the alternative weekly Anchorage Press from 2019-2022. She is coeditor of Wheels on Ice: Stories of Cycling in Alaska … Continue reading From the Desk of Jessica Cherry: Polar Exploration Is for Everyone

Mary Peltola (Yup’ik) wins Alaska special election, becoming first Alaska Native in Congress

Mary Peltola (Yup’ik) won a special election for the House seat left vacant after the death of Republican Don Young. Her win makes Peltola the first Democrat in 50 years and the first woman to hold the seat along with … Continue reading Mary Peltola (Yup’ik) wins Alaska special election, becoming first Alaska Native in Congress

From the Desk of Mary F. Ehrlander: Reflections on the Appeal and Value of Biography

Throughout the month of November we will feature books and authors from our list to celebrate Native American Heritage Month. Mary F. Ehrlander is the director of Arctic and Northern Studies and a professor of history at the University of Alaska … Continue reading From the Desk of Mary F. Ehrlander: Reflections on the Appeal and Value of Biography

NEWS AND REVIEWS

Books Falafel Nation by Yael Raviv Praise from the Jewish Book Council: “. . . a detailed, meticulously researched, academic assessment of the ways in which Zionist political goals, local demographics and economics, Labor Zionism’s emphasis on the revival of Jewish agriculture on biblical soil, and more all combined to create modern Israeli identity on both national and individual levels . . . a thought-provoking read for someone interested in a detailed, intellectual exploration of the origins of Israeli identity from a new perspective.” So, How Long Have You Been Native? by Alexis C. Bunten Recommendation from Alaska Dispatch News: “Bunten wanders over … Continue reading NEWS AND REVIEWS

Off the Shelf: Unlearning to Fly by Jennifer Brice

Unlearning to Fly cover image Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "At the Airport: A Romance" from Unlearning to Fly by Jennifer Brice:

"My father proposed to my mother in an airport. I like that sentence so much, I can hardly bear to revise it. But I must. The second time my father proposed to my mother, it was in an airport. The first time was in a car. They’d met three weeks earlier, when my father’s brother, Sam, asked my mother to be my father’s blind date for his own birthday party. He was twenty-seven and she was twenty-five. Back then, Al Brice was holding down three jobs: a mechanic for Pan Am, an afterhours fueler for a jet fuel-supply company, and a logger for his family’s fledgling land-clearing concern. Carol Heeks was a public health nurse who’d arrived in Fairbanks in July of 1961 at the wheel of a blue Plymouth Valiant. A New Yorker by birth and temperament, she was unwilling to spend the rest of her life in a frontier outpost so unprepossessing that a person could drive the length and breadth of it—as she once had—without ever realizing she’d arrived.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Unlearning to Fly by Jennifer Brice”