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State of Alaska > Department of Education & Early Development > Alaska
State Council on the Arts > About Us
Peggy Shumaker, Alaska State Writer Laureate
Peggy Shumaker is the Alaska State Writer Laureate 2010-2012. Her new book of poems is Gnawed Bones. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. She's currently working on a manuscript of poems set in Costa Rica. Peggy lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, and travels widely. Professor emerita at University of Alaska Fairbanks, she teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop and at many writing conferences and festivals.
Born in La Mesa, California, Peggy Shumaker grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She earned her B.A. in English and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. As a writer in residence for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Peggy worked with prison inmates, honors students, gang members, deaf adults, teen parents, little kids, library patrons, and elderly folks. |
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Peggy Shumaker - Photo credit Barry McWayne |
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.
Her poems have been published in Russia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium, 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. Washington Press), A Year in Place (U. Utah Press), Prairie Schooner, Brevity, and Ascent.
In 2008, Peggy founded Boreal Books (), an imprint of Red Hen Press, to publish literature and fine art from Alaska.
Peggy was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She's active on the National Advisory Board for the Prairie Schooner Book Prizes and the Advisory Board of Red Hen Press. Peggy is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review. She has served as poet in residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell and as the president of the board of directors of AWP.
Please feel free to contact her at . |
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