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 Jessica Jacobs, Francine Merasty, and John Bargowski.

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards, and Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O'Keeffe, winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal, she lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books / Penguin Random House) and is at work on a collection of poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash.

Francine Merasty is a Canadian poet and AQR contributor. Her recently released debut poetry collection, ISKOTEW ISKWEW Poetry of a Northern Rez Girl (Bookland Press, 2021) includes the poem “Since Time Immemorial” (Alaska Quarterly Review Vol. 36 3-4) which was selected for The Best American Poetry 2020. ISKOTEW ISKWEW portrays Merasty’s lived experience as an Indigenous woman raised on the Pelican Narrows Reserve in the 1980s, her memories of the wilderness, and her experiences as a residential school survivor. Merasty is a Nēhithaw Iskwew (Cree Woman) from Wapawikoschikanek (Pelican Narrows), a reserve in Northern Saskatchewan, and a member of the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation. She is a winner of the Canadian 2019 Indigenous Voices Awards.

John Bargowskireceived a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Distinguished Artist Fellowship, The Rose Lefcowitz Prize from Poet Lore, and the Theodore Roethke Prize from David Wagoner for a group of poems published in Poetry Northwest. His newest book American Chestnut (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2021). His first book Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway was selected by Paul Mariani for the Bordighera Prize and published in an Italian and English Edition in 2012. Several of his poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In addition to Alaska Quarterly Review, his work has been published on the Poetry Daily website, and in Poetry, Ploughshares, New Ohio Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, and Journal of New Jersey Poets, among others.

Pièces de Résistance: Jessica Jacobs, Francine Merasty & John Bargowski