JEREMYPATAKY
Jeremy Pataky is the author of Overwinter (University of Alaska Press). His poetry and essays have appeared in journals including Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, The Southeast Review, Cirque, Camas, Ice Floe, Left-Facing Bird, Anchorage Press, Chatter Marks, and many other journals and anthologies. Jeremy earned an MFA at the University of Montana and a BA at Western Washington University. He is founder and publisher of Porphyry Press and co-publisher/co-editor of Edible Alaska magazine. He is a former executive director (and a founding former board member) of 49 Writers, a literary nonprofit in the 49th state. A settler on Ahtna Nenn' and Dena’ina Ełnena lands, he splits his time between McCarthy and Anchorage, Alaska.
Jeremy Pataky writes through personal and shared senses of place in changing environments. He writes to reconcile varied understandings of wild nature in remote northern environments that host both the scientific pursuit of knowledge and the adaptive lifeways of Indigenous people. Invested in places that serve as actual, literal homes as well as metaphors in distant imaginations, he writes from Alaska in a time when traditional indicators of wildness transmute to icons of a changing environment.
His first book of poetry, Overwinter, evaluates subjective experiences against sensory, aesthetic, and scientific forces brought to bear in the heavily glaciated and remote region where he lives six months each year. About a mile from the toe of the Kennicott Glacier and due north from the edge of the largest nonpolar icefield in North America, his cabin is located near the center of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in eastern Alaska. Part of a 24-million-acre World Heritage Site—the largest international protected area on the planet—the area is a magnet for glaciologists, artists, geologists, biologists, mountaineers, and more.
His current work in progress is a poetic inquiry into the lyric and scientific properties of glacier ice, permafrost, glaciated and deglaciated landscapes, and their shifting cultural significance in a time of political and environmental upheaval. Jeremy was a recent participant in the Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER)’s In a Time of Change (ITOC) program.
