Past Writers

thúy lê (full name lê thi diem thúy) is a novelist, poet and solo performance artist. She left her native Vietnam by boat in 1978 with her family and settled in Southern California. lê writes about the experiences of Vietnamese refugees living in the United States, in her words, the “floating casualties of history.” By focusing on the experiences of individuals within historic events, she confronts conventional history and memory. Her well-received first novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003), chronicles the life of a Vietnamese girl growing up in California with memories of being a boat refugee and of a brother who drowned in Vietnam as well as an alcoholic father.

lê came to Sitka through collaboration with the United States Artists and the Rasmuson Foundation. She was the US Artist Ford Fellow in Literature for 2008. Find out more on thúy lê's page

Carlos Reyes’ many books of poems include The Book of Shadows: New and Selected Poems and At the Edge of the Western Wave. His newest book, Pomegranate, Sister of the Heart, was released in 2012 by Lost Horse Press. An avid traveler and translator, his knowledge of labor, the land, and the daily struggles of everyday existence inform his work. Carlos’ poems have been widely anthologized and published in numerous literary journals. He has taught poetry in the schools and in community workshops throughout the Northwest. Other jobs have involved him in commercial fishing, migrant farm work, surveying and engineering, and college teaching. In 2007 he was awarded a Heinrich Boll Fellowship to write on Achill Island, Ireland, and in 2008 was awarded the Ethel Fortner Award from St Andrews College.  He recently made a trip to Bengaluru, India, where he gave readings and met with Indian poets and writers.

Get a glimpse of Carlos’ work through this selection of his poetry and his recent interview with Dave Karecki in Portland.

Linda Green is an anthropologist whose work has involved her with indigenous peoples in Central America, the American Southwest, and Alaska. Her book, Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala, is a deeply moving account of Mayan women who lived daily with inescapable violence, constantly building and rebuilding their lives to survive the terrors of a twenty-year civil war.
Linda currently lives in Arizona and is the Director of the Center for Latin American studies at the University of Arizona. She is concerned with humanitarian issues of migrants crossing the border and was recently awarded a Wenner-Gren Foundation International Collaborative Research Grant for a project entitled “Impacts of Illegality: Immigration Raids, Social Networks, Vulnerable Spaces.” During her Island Institute residency, she worked on her book To Die in the Silence of History, which emerged from her research on the social and cultural effects of the tuberculosis epidemics in Southwest Alaska. Linda is a humanitarian-scholar whose work aims to both change our thinking and make a difference in the life of others.

is a senior lecturer at the University of Mauritius. His short story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” which appeared in the fall 2010 Connotations, was first published in Jungfrau: A Selection of Works from the Caine Prize in African Writing (2007).  Other pieces have appeared in Journeys, Farafina Literary Journal, and Wasafiri. His story “Compass” was selected by Nobel Prize J.M. Coetzee for the second prize of the HSBC/SA PEN Literary Award 2005. He has edited numerous collections and anthologies, most recently Mauritian Impressions, the first anthology of Mauritian literature in English for over 20 years. He came to Sitka through the International Writing Program (link) at the University of Iowa.

For more insight into Farhad’s work, check out his periscope and interview from the International Writing Program.

Kate Miller came to Sitka to work on a novel of historical fiction set in Sitka and Russia during the Russian-American colonial era. Her earlier publications include articles for history journals and anthologies, as well as poems. Her novel in progress, Sitkha, is her first work of fiction. Kate holds a Master’s Degree in English and taught literature and writing classes in Maryland for twelve years. Following that she took courses toward a Ph.D. in American Studies, but interrupted her studies for a career with the National Park Service, including three years as Alaska Regional Historian in the late 1980’s. She also worked for four years as Executive Director of the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute at Northland College in Wisconsin. She lives with her husband in International Falls, Minnesota.

thúy lê (full name lê thi diem thúy) is a novelist, poet and solo performance artist. She left her native Vietnam by boat in 1978 with her family and settled in Southern California. lê writes about the experiences of Vietnamese refugees living in the United States, in her words, the “floating casualties of history.” By focusing on the experiences of individuals within historic events, she confronts conventional history and memory. Her well-received first novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003), chronicles the life of a Vietnamese girl growing up in California with memories of being a boat refugee and of a brother who drowned in Vietnam as well as an alcoholic father.

lê came to Sitka through collaboration with the United States Artists and the Rasmuson Foundation. She was the US Artist Ford Fellow in Literature for 2008. Find out more on thúy lê's page

Susan Power received a law degree from Harvard University in 1986 and turned to creative writing after reading the works of Native American writer Louise Erdrich. Susan is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux, and her stories are informed by her Native heritage. She received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1992. She has published two books, The Grass Dancer, which won PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction, and Roofwalker. She has served as writer-in-residence at Princeton University and has received a Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellowship. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, the Paris Review, and Harper’s Bazaar, and in anthologies such as Best American Short Stories 1993, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, and The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak . . . and Everything Else in the World since 1953. She teaches at Hamline University in Minnesota.

Susan came to Sitka through collaboration with the United States Artists and the Rasmuson Foundation. She was the US Artist Gund Fellow in Literature for 2006.

Alice Pung is a writer, lawyer and teacher from Victoria, Australia. The author of Her Father’s Daughter and Unpolished Gem and the editor of Growing up Asian in Australia, Alice has received enormous critical acclaim for her writing. Unpolished Gem won the 2007 Australian Newcomer of the Year award in the Australian Book Industry Awards, was shortlisted for several other awards, has been translated into other languages and is also published in the UK and US. She has had stories and articles published in Good Weekend, Meanjin, the Monthly, Age, The Best Australian Stories 2007 and Etchings.

In 2008, Alice was the Asialink writer-in-residence at Peking University. In 2011, Alice was the Australian representative to the US Department of State ‘Fall and Recovery’ writers’ tour of disaster and conflict sites of America. She has also given guest lectures at Brown University, Vassar College, Peking University, the University of Bologna, the University of Milano and the University of Pisa.

She came to Sitka through the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

For current information, visit her website.

Jerry Martien is the author of Shell Game: A True Account of Beads and Money in North America, a history of economic exchange, as well as three books of poetry: Pieces in Place; Upriver Downriver; and Journey Work. During his residency he worked on a forthcoming book about caretaking—of both people and land—in California. He holds both a B.A and a Ph.D. in English, and was a lecturer in Creative Writing at Humboldt State University in California for twelve years. He was involved in the Poets-in-the-Schools program in three California counties for fifteen years. One of the early proponents of bioregionalism, he has been involved with the work of various regional environmental organizations. He has also worked with his neighbors to preserve and restore the coastal dunes near Eureka, California, where he lives.

Ellen Waterston is an award-wining poet and essayist from Bend, Oregon. A New Englander who married and moved to the ranching West, Ellen grounds her writing in both of those cultural and geographic landscapes. Her award-winning essays, short stories and poems have been published in numerous journals, anthologies and reviews. Her most recent book, Where the Crooked River Rises: A High Desert Home (OSU Press 2010), illuminates the people, places and landscape of Central Oregon’s vast high desert, and was partly written during her Sitka residency. Two collections of Ellen’s poetry, Between Desert Seasons and I Am Madagascar, have been awarded WILLA Prizes in Poetry (2009 and 2005, respectively). Her memoir, Then There Was No Mountain, was selected by the Oregonian as one of the top ten books in 2003.

Ellen is the founder and director of The Nature of Words, an annual literary event that brings nationally recognized authors and poets for four days of readings, panel discussions, and workshops to Bend, Oregon the first weekend of November.

For current information, visit her website.

Tony Garcia has been the Executive Artistic Director of El Centro Su Teatro since 1989 and has been a member of Su Teatro since 1972. He received his BA in Theatre from the University of Colorado at Denver. Tony has received numerous awards and accolades for his artistic vision, including the 1989 University of California, Irvine Chicano Literary Award, a 2006 United States Artists Fellowship, and was named the Denver Post 2010 Theatre Person of the Year. Most recently, he received the prestigious Livingston Fellowship from the Bonfils Stanton Foundation. Tony is a past faculty member for the National Association of Latino Art and Culture (NALAC) Leadership Institute as well as a past board member, he is a peer trainer for the Colorado Creative Industries’ Peer Assistance Network, and a member of the Western State Arts Federation’s (WESTAF) Board of Trustees. Tony is also an adjunct professor at Metro State College in Denver.

Tony came to Sitka through collaboration with the United States Artists and the Rasmuson Foundation. He was the US Artist Rockefeller Fellow in Theater Arts for 2006.

Maya Kucherskaya is a Russian novelist, fiction writer, literary critic and essayist. She has published two short story collections; the 2004 bestseller Modern Patericon: To Be Read in Times of Despair*; one novel Rain God*; a biography of Grand Duke Constantine Romanov, and a children’s adaptation of the New Testament.  She holds a PhD in Literature from UCLA, and is a professor in the Department of Russian Literature at the Russian School of Economics. Maya’s awards include the 2007 Student Booker Prize and the 2006 Molodaya Gvardia Award.  She contributes a column to the daily Vedomosti and cultural commentaries on radio broadcasts. (* English titles)

She came to Sitka through the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Christopher Preston is a writer and environmental philosopher. He holds degrees in Philosophy and Applied Ethics from the University of Oregon, Colorado State University, and University of Durham in England.  He grounds his theoretical work in environmental ethics through his years working in Alaskan fishing and oil industries as well as with the National Park Service. Christopher’s work has been published in a wide range of environmental and philosophical journals. His first book, Grounding Knowledge: Environmental Philosophy, Epistemology and Place (University of Georgia, 2003) is an investigation of “sense of place” through a discussion of how place and mind interact.  Most recently, he wrote Saving Creation: Nature and Faith in the Life of Holmes Rolston, III, a biography of the “father of environmental ethics” which deals with Rolston’s work at the intersection of science, theology, and the environment.  Preston teaches part-time as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montana in Missoula. He is also a part-time Tool Librarian for the Missoula Urban Demonstration Project.