For the March installment of this series we’re journeying to Alaska, where we’ll find three extraordinary poets:

Erin Coughlin Hollowell is a poet and writer who lives at the end of the road in Homer, Alaska. Prior to landing in Alaska, she lived on both US coasts, in big cities and small towns, pursuing many different professions from tapestry weaving to arts administration. She is the author of Pause, Traveler (2013) and Every Atom (2018), both published by Boreal Books, and Corvus and Crater published by Salmon Poetry in 2023. Her work was featured in an exhibit at the Rasmuson Museum entitled Water Stories: Visual Poetics and Collective Voices by artist Andrea Wollensak. She has most recently been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Orion Magazine, Terrain.org, Rust + Moth, and featured on the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day website. 

Hollowell has been awarded two Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist fellowships, a Connie Boochever Award, and an Alaska Literary Award. She has been appointed a 2022-2025 Black Earth Institute Fellow. In 2023, she was awarded a Contributions to Literacy in Alaska (CLIA) Award by the Alaska Center for the Book. She is the executive director of Storyknife Writers Retreat and director of the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. 

Peggy Shumaker served as Alaska State Writer Laureate and as the Rasmuson Foundation's Distinguished Artist.  She received a poetry fellowship from the NEA. Shumaker is the author of eight books of poetry, including Cairn, new and selected. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. Professor emerita at University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker taught for 20 years in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA at PLU. She serves on the boards of Storyknife and the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prizes. Shumaker edits Boreal Books (an imprint of Red Hen Press) and the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press, and is contributing editor for Alaska Quarterly Review and Cutthroat. She’s a panelist for the Alaska Literary Awards. Shumaker has a new book coming soon from Red Hen Press. 

Annie Wenstrup is a Dena’ina poet living in Fairbanks, Alaska. Her work recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, the New England Review, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and Ran Off with the Star Bassoon,. Her writing is supported by an Alaska Literary Award, the Rasmusson Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Storyknife, and the CIRI Foundation. Annie has an MFA in Creative Writing from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. In 2022 and 2023 she was an Inaugural and Returning Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow. Now Annie serves as the Alumni and Donor Relations Coordinator for Indigenous Nations Poets.

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