Corpse Whale

Acknowledgments

99 Acknowledgments My deepest gratitude for this book’s beginning, which was composed at The Institute of American Indian Arts, Port Townsend Writer’s Program; Naropa University for the middle; and for its completion at Soul Mountain Retreat and Stonecoast College at the University of Southern Maine. My earnest acknowledgments go to Red Ink Magazine, To Topos: Ahani, Many Mountains Moving, Future Earth, Washington Square, Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, and Drunken Boat, where versions of these poems have appeared. I wish also to express my appreciation to my family: The Creator, Nellie Nanuq Okpik O’Neill, Vera Williams, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Mary Sage, Allison Worden, Eddie Rexford, Tracey Miller, Brandy Lee and Stormy; and to my extended family: Rachel Craig, Sadie Brower Neakok, Donald Stearns, Margaret Stearns, Edward White, Dennis Stearns, Paul and Anne Burger, Ty, Travis, Yvonne, and Cyril Burger; and also for the leadership and scholarship of Corwin Clairemont and Linda King, Arthur Sze, Jon Davis, Marilyn Nelson, James Thomas Stevens, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Heather Cahoon, Jody Perez, Orlando White, Layli LongSoldier, Sherwin Bitsui, Jennifer Foerster, S. G. Frazier, Britta Andersson, and my darling husband, Myron Burger—without their support and friendship this book would not have been possible. 101 About the Author dg nanouk okpik is an Alaskan Native, Inupiat—Inuit, from the arctic slope. Her family resides in Barrow, Alaska. In 2003, okpik received the Truman Capote Literary Trust Award. She graduated with an AFA in 2004 and a BFA in Creative Writing with honors in 2005 from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She went on to get her MFA in Creative Writing at Stonecoast College at the University of Southern Maine in Portland in January 2010. Effigies, her first chapbook, was released in April 2009. okpik has been published in Red Ink Magazine, New York University’s Washington Square, and in the Oregon Literary Council’s Ahani Indigenous Writers Anthology. Her work has also appeared in Many Mountains Moving Journal, Poet Lore, and American Poet: Journal of the Academy of American Poets recently emerging poet award by Arthur Sze. Most recently her work appears in the anthology, Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke and published by the University of Arizona Press. dg nanouk okpik currently works at the Santa Fe Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico. ...