Tidal Echoes Launch Page

Besides her family and friends, Elise Tomlinson has three great loves in life: books (and the libraries that house them), being in nature, and creating art. She moved from Nebraska to Alaska right out of high school in 1988, and earned her bachelor of fine art’s degree at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her first desk job was at the UAA Consortium Library, where she started as a student worker shelving books; she moved to Hawaii to earn her Master’s of Science in Library and Information Science, and was hired as a library faculty member at UAS after she graduated in 1999. She also earned a Master’s degree in Public Administration from UAS, and is currently the UAS Library Dean. She has been a painter since childhood and has exhibited throughout Alaska including multiple solo shows at the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council Gallery, the Juneau Douglas City Museum, and at Annie Kaill’s Fine Art and Crafts Gallery in Juneau, and at the Kimura Gallery and the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage. She has sold paintings and prints to collectors around the country and overseas through her website 

Mistee St. Clair is mostly a narrative poet who writes from a place of introspection, longing, and grief about family, relationships, and the more than human in our world. She is interested in telling the human story, threading her poems with science, weather, and nonhuman beings. She’s working on finishing her first full collection. Emerging themes are raising young adults, family, the changing climate, and exploring her own adoption and cultural loss. She sees poetry as a way to seek meaning and understanding when life is full of complications, within our own families and the world at large. We have a lot to grapple with in these everchanging, fast-paced, and politically divisive times. Writing is a way to explore the internal struggles and fears surrounding these big swamping topics. For her it’s an outlet to explore her feelings and thoughts. It’s also a way to pay attention and see the good in the world, to be reassured by looking at the beautiful and hopeful things that have always existed and will continue to exist. She is the author of the chapbook This Morning is Different and has received a 2023 Individual Artist Award from the Rasmuson Foundation and a 2021 Alaska Literary Award from the Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation. She has poems in or forthcoming in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Common, Northwest Review, SWWIM Every Day, and others. Currently, she lives with her family and ball-obsessed border collie in Lingít Aaní, where she hikes, writes, and wanders the mossy rainforest. She is a 49 Writers board member and an editor for the Alaska State Legislature. She can be found at misteestclair.com. Of northern European and Tanana Athabascan descent, she is an enrolled member of the Native Village of Minto.