Alaska News

Three Alaskan artists earn national honors this month

It's been a big September for three Alaskan artists in the national eye. On Sunday, former Fairbanksan Jill Daniels accepted her second Emmy for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation" at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards at the Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE in Los Angeles last Saturday according to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. She won for her background drawings on the Disney Channel cartoon "Phineas and Ferb."

On Monday, Alaskan singer/songwriter Melissa Mitchell was named the winner of the 2012 Mountain State NewSong Contest "People's Choice" Award. Mitchell -- born in Anchorage but raised in Kasilof -- has been making music, playing shows and recording albums in her home state since a young age. According to NewSong Music Group, "over 10,000 votes were cast" during this year's voting process, and Mitchell received the "most amount of votes of all regional finalists." She will be joining other NewSong winners in New York City on Oct. 20, for the final "Award Round."

And Alaskan Poet Joan Kane was recently named the winner of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) 2012 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry for her newest book, "Hyperboreal." Kane is an Iñupiaq writer from Anchorage with ties to King Island and Mary's Igloo, Alaska. According to AWP, Kane's "Hyperboreal" houses "vivid, disturbing and mysterious poems written in English and Iñupiaq." The collection is "situated at a threshold between cultures, between inner and out worlds, and the poems are voiced with a 'knife blade at the throat's slight swell.'"

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

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