Presented by Alaska Quarterly Review and co-hosted by the Anchorage Museum, Pièces de Résistance returns for a second series of talks with notable poets and novelists hosted online by Ronald Spatz. This event features authors Denise Duhamel, Eva Saulitis (read by Mara Saulitis), Marlin M Jenkins, and Robert Davis Hoffmann.

Eva Saulitis (1963-2016) was an author, poet, and marine biologist who studied marine mammals in the Prince William Sound, Alaska. Saulitis was most known for her research on the Chugach transient killer whales (Orcinus orca) of the A1 pod during the decimation of the habitat after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Throughout her life, Saulitis published five books that encapsulated her research and her personal life: Becoming Earth (Boreal Books/ Red Hen Press, 2017), Prayer in the Wind (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2015), Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas (Beacon Press, 2013), Many Ways to Say It (Red Hen Press, 2012), and Leaving Resurrection Chronicles of a Whale Scientist (Boreal Books, 2008). Her essays and poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Alaska Quarterly Review (in which one of her essays was cited as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays), Orion, The Sun, The Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, and The Utne Reader. Eva was a good friend to AQR and a frequent contributor to our pages in poetry and literary nonfiction. Her poems will be read by her sister, Mara Saulitis.

Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit and currently teaches high school in Minnesota. The author of the poetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020) and a graduate of University of Michigan’s MFA program, he has worked as a teaching artist, a university lecturer, and a bookseller. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published by Alaska Quarterly Review, Mizna, Missouri Review, Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Waxwing, and Kenyon Review, among others.

Robert Davis Hoffmann (Xaashuch'eet) is a poet, carver/sculptor, painter/mixed-media artist, theater set designer, and workshop teacher. He is the author of SoulCatcher (Raven’s Bones Press, Sitka, Alaska,1986) and a new and selected collection is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press. In 2009, Alaska Quarterly Review published a special feature devoted to his poems. His poetry is anthologized in Into the Storm, Orca Press; In the Dreamlight: Twenty-One Alaskan Writers, Copper Canyon Press; Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth Century Native American Poetry; Dancing on the Rim of the World: An Anthology of Contemporary Northwest Native American Writing, University of Arizona Press; Raven Tells Stories: An Anthology of Alaska Native Writing, Greenfield Review Press; Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices, The Aperture Foundation; Alaska Quarterly Review’s Alaska Native Writers, Storytellers, and Orators: The Expanded Edition (and also included in the original edition), Native Universe: Voices of Indian America, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.. His collaborations include “We Come Out of the Fog” with Martin Brody, Composer, 2009 and “Three Sitka Portraits” with Owen Underhill, Composer, Vancouver Bach Choir, (2011). Hoffmann’s tribal affiliation is Tlingit Indian from Kake, Alaska. Tsaagweidi clan, Xaay Hit (Yellow Cedar House).

Pièces de Résistance: Eva Saulitis (read by Mara Saulitis), Marlin M Jenkins, Robert Davis Hoffmann