EVERY DAY, ANNALIESE JAKIMIDES shows up. She shows up to write about people and place, about the narrative of our lives—in prose and poetry, the world of the real and the world of the imaginary.
Her prose and poetry have been published in many journals and magazines, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Utne Reader, Decor Maine, and GQ, as well as in anthologies such as Breaking Bread: Essays from New England on Food, Hunger, and Family; This I Believe II: More Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women; Rivers of Ink: Literary Reflections on the Penobscot; The Essential Hip Mama, About Face, and A Dangerous New World. Cited in national competitions, most recently as a finalist for the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her work has also been broadcast on NPR and MPBN. She has been a finalist twice in both poetry and nonfiction for the Maine Literary Awards. Along with Troy Casa, she is the cofounder of the Belfast Poetry Festival in Belfast, Maine.
She has had the privilege of interviewing many artists, musicians, and writers, including Tess Gerritsen, Harold Garde, Noel Paul Stookey, Lois Dodd, Daniel Minter, Jamie Wyeth, Ashley Bryan, Alex Katz, and Melissa Sweet. She is the editor of the annual monograph series of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts as well as the editor of Vision & Legacy: Celebrating the Architecture of Haystack. She facilitates life conversations discussions through the lens of books and has taught workshops about writing, parenting, the vegetarian life, and life in general.
Years ago, Jakimides traded her childhood city (Boston) for a town with less than 200 residents in northern Maine (Mount Chase), where she raised almost everything her family ate, pumped water by hand, and learned how to cohabit with moose and fox, eagles and blackflies and the extraordinary people of a small town on the edge of Baxter State Park. She now lives in an old high school in downtown Bangor, Maine, and writes in a closet.
(photo by Jodi Renshaw)