Blaze
Editorial Reviews Book Description Savoring Alaskan landscapes by way of birch trees has become Kes Woodward's trademark. This collection brings together thirty years of his birch portraits and forest close-ups. Over those same thirty years, poet Peggy Shumaker has traveled inner landscapes via images drawn from two deserts-the Sonoran and the Subarctic. Her poems embody the harsh beauty of heat and cold, the force of true extremes.
Wounded trees, marked paths, slashes of color. Bursts of passions, licks of flame. The sensual spirits of two imaginations at work fuel this volume. About the Author Peggy Shumaker was born in La Mesa, California, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She earned her BA and MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. For many years she was writer in residence for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, working with school children, prison inmates, honors students, deaf adults, teen parents, gang members, library patrons, and the elderly.
Peggy Shumaker's books of poems include Underground Rivers (Red Hen Press), Wings Moist from the Other World, The Circle of Totems, Braided River, and Esperanza's Hair. 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.
Shumaker has 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 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 MFA 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.
Kesler Woodward was born in Aiken, South Carolina in 1951. He and his wife Missy live in LaConner, Washington, where they are partners in Braarud/Woodward Fine Art. They were Alaska residents from 1977 through 2004.
Woodward served as Curator of Visual Arts at the Alaska State Museum and as Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Center of Alaska before moving to Fairbanks in 1981. He is currently Professor of Art, Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he taught for two decades, serving as Chair of the Art Department and as Chair of the Division of Arts and Communications. He currently serves on the board of the Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation and on the board of trustees of the Western States Arts Federation.
Woodward's paintings are included in all major public art collections in Alaska, and in museum, corporate and private collections on both coasts of the United States. Solo exhibits to his credit include the Morris Museum of Art, University of Alaska Museum, Alaska State Museum, Anchorage Museum of History and Art, and public and commercial galleries throughout the U.S. Juried and invitational exhibitions including his work have ranged from Alaska to Brazil and Russia.
Also an art historian and curator, Woodward since 1990 has published six books on Alaskan art, including the first comprehensive survey of the fine arts in Alaska, Painting in the North, published by the Anchorage Museum and University of Washington Press in 1993. His latest volume, A Northern Adventure: The Art of Fred Machetanz, was published in May, 2004. He has lectured on art of the circumpolar north from Alaska to Georgia, New England, and the British Museum in London.
In October, 2004, Kesler Woodward received the Alaska Governor's Art Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Blaze,Peggy Shumaker,Kessler E. Woodward,Red Hen Press,1597090549,Art,General
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