Welcome to the University of Alaska Press,
publisher of award-winning books on Alaska and the circumpolar north. Fairbanks Rising and the Rain, The Tatiana
Our purpose is to publish and distribute nonfiction about Alaska, the
Pacific Rim, Arctic Canada, Siberia, and Scandinavia. We publish on
topics that include:
* history and politics
* natural history
* anthropology, Native studies, and folklore
* Native languages and literatures
* geology, climate, and the aurora
* exploration
* northern health
We invite you to explore our site and learn more about the North through
our books.
Our Newest Books
A Gold Rush Town that Beat the Odds
Authors: Cole, Dermot
Price: $14.95 / ISBN 978-1-60223-030-9 Paper
Publication Date:
Nature played a joke on Ohio fortune hunter E. T. Barnette when low water forced him to unload a sternwheeler cargo of trading goods short of his destination in 1901. But the accidental founder of Fairbanks soon had a reversal of fortune. Italian-born prospector Felix Pedro found gold in the nearby hills. Barnette prospered, until his shady practices caught up with him, while the new gold rush town took off on a turbulent ride through the 20th century.
While other gold rush towns became ghost towns, Fairbanks, survived floods, fires, a harsh climate, and an economic history with as many peaks and valleys as the Alaska Range. It attracted fools and visionaries, characters and people with character, and above all men and women with determination and grit who came to stay. The city drew strength from its isolation to become the regional hub of transportation, resource development, education, and government that it is today.
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Collected Poems
Authors: Straley, John
Price: $19.95 / ISBN 13: 978-1-60223-033-0 (paper)
Publication Date: Ocotber 2008
COMING SOON--Preorder The Rising and the Rain today!
The Rising And The Rain is Alaskan novelist John Straley’s first book of poetry. With a keen eye and self deprecating humor, he paints a portrait of the region he calls home: the Pacific Northwest and southeastern Alaska. Local at inception but universal in scope, Straley’s narrative poems encompass the personal and political. Sometimes finding humor and solace in the absurd, they always return to the abiding source of life along this wild stretch of the Pacific. The Rising And The Rain is a celebration of the cycles of rain, the seasons, and the many promises the earth always keeps.
John Straley was educated in Seattle and New York City, graduating from the University of Washington in 1977 after studying under the tutelage of Nelson Bentley and James Welch. He has been a wilderness guide, woods worker, secretary, apprentice machinist, a novelist and for almost twenty-five years, a criminal defense investigator. In 2006 he was named the 12th Alaska Writer Laureate and is currently a criminal defense investigator for Alaska’s Public Defender Agency. In May 2008 he will be awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He lives in Sitka, Alaska with his wife Janice.
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Authors: Jones, Dorothy M.
Price: $12.00 / ISBN 13: 978-0-940055-51-3 (paper)
Publication Date: 2001
Tatiana is an Aleut woman who must deal with the changes to her people’s way of life and to their homes, especially when World War II breaks out and her whole village is evacuated to Southeast Alaska. How she helps hold her family and village together makes a riveting story, told in Tatiana’s poetic and powerful voice.
--Anchorage Daily News
In Tatiana , Dorothy Jones carries us across five decades of Alaska Native life with the story of a woman of fortitude and intelligence. Like the landscape in which it takes place, this historical novel is at once beautiful and complex; stark, violent and ultimately redeeming. It reflects the complexities faced by Alaska villages in the twentieth century with tenderness and clarity.
--Ray Hudson, Author of Moments Rightly Placed: An Aleutian Memoir
Tatiana is an extraordinary example of what can happen when the social scientist's skills are merged with a novelist's imagination. In creating her title character, Dorothy Jones has crafted a compelling life story of a woman through whom we come to see the singularity, dignity, and tragedy of a little-known people in the Aleutians, as they struggle to survive a cultural onslaught.
--Lillian Rubin, Author of Tangled Lives: Daughters, Mothers, and the Crucible of Aging
Tatiana is a tale about a remarkable Aleut woman (known as Chief of all the Aleuts), as she her family, and her village struggle against the erosion of their culture, including their World War II internment in an abandoned salmon cannery. The book is set in an Aleut village with a small but powerful population of whites from 1938-1945, a period when change accelerated at rapid speed. The drama of the interactions with each other and the whites reveals not only the external aspects but also intimate parts of their lives, their thoughts, beliefs, tensions, conflicts, and aspirations. Tatiana, poetic voice highlights the powerful but oft-hidden role of Native American women. We learn how she helps to hold her family and village together during this historically significant and tense time.
Though Tatiana is fiction it was inspired by actual events and the author’s personal experiences as a resident and researcher in the Aleutians. Some of the dialogue, characters, and actions have been created. Two of the chapters in slightly different form have appeared as short stories in Women and Earth: “Ephreama” (October, 1997 and “Ephreama 2” (March 1999).
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