Writer's Place, Kansas City
The University of Nebraska Press published Just Breathe Normally, Peggy Shumaker's new book of lyrical nonfiction. Her most recent book of poetry is Blaze, a collection of sensual Alaskan paintings and poems. This collaboration with the painter Kesler Woodward was published in 2005 by Red Hen Press. Her previous books include Underground Rivers (Red Hen Press), Wings Moist from the Other World, The Circle of Totems, Braided River, and Esperanza's Hair. Her poems have been published in Russia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, and throughout the United States. Her nonfiction has appeared in Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction (Norton), A Road of Her Own (Fulcrum), Under Northern Lights (U. WA Press), A Year in Place (U. UT Press), Prairie Schooner and Ascent.
Peggy Shumaker was born in La Mesa, California, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She earned her B.A. in English and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. Shumaker was writer in residence for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, working with prison inmates, honors students, gang members, deaf adults, teen parents, little kids, library patrons, and elderly folks. She has given readings in art galleries, a governor's mansion, a clearing in the woods, an abandoned bank, on reservations, in libraries, at a gold dredge, under the hoodoos at Bryce Canyon, on a riverboat, and at many bookstores, community centers, and universities
Shumaker won a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and several awards for teaching. She served as Poet in Residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University and as President of the Board of Directors of the Associated Writing Programs. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker was Chair of the English Department and Director of the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing. She currently teaches in the low-residency Rainier Writing Workshop. Peggy Shumaker and her husband Joe Usibelli live in Fairbanks, Alaska, and travel widely.
Jake Adam York is the author of Murder Ballads (2005), selected by Jane Satterfield for the Fifth Annual Elixir Press Awards Judge's Prize, and A Murmuration of Starlings, selected by Cathy Song for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (2008).
His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Oxford American, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, Diagram, Octopus, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals as well as in the anthologies Visiting Walt (Iowa University Press, 2003) and Digerati (Three Candles, 2006).
York is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where he directs an undergraduate Creative Writing program and produces Copper Nickel with his students.
