Annaliese Jakimides

Annaliese Jakimides’s poetry and prose have been published in many journals and magazines—including Beloit Poetry Journal, Southeast Review, Solstice, GQ, Maine Home & Design, Hip Mama—and anthologies—such as About Face, This I Believe II, and A Dangerous New World. It has also been broadcast on NPR and Maine Public. New work is forthcoming in four anthologies. She has interviewed and written about almost 100 of Maine’s creatives, including Lois Dodd, Noel Paul Stookey, Melissa Sweet, Ashley Bryan, Clara Neptune Keezer, Alex Katz, Cathie Pelletier, Jamie Wyeth, Lisa Tyson Ennis, Daniel Minter, and Harold Garde. Cited in national and regional competitions and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, she has been a finalist for the Maine Literary Awards, in both poetry and nonfiction in multiple years, as well as a finalist for, most recently, the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize.

A freelance writer and editor, she facilitates life conversations through the lens of books in community settings, including recovery centers and jails, and supports the work of arts and environmental justice organizations from Detroit, Michigan, to Deer Isle, Maine.

“For many years,” she notes, “I have written in a closet, six feet by four feet nine inches, at a desk that is a hollow door balanced on two empty, beige filing cabinets… If you were physically here with me and could spin around, a small tight pirouette, arms locked around your torso, you would understand why the cabinets are empty. I am an in-your-face writer, calmed, it seems, by chaos. I am surrounded in paper—imprinted with words and images, lyrics, lists and names, histories, excitements—thumbtacked, taped, paper-clipped, dangling and leaning. It is as if my desk were a moving creature with no edges, climbing up the walls that both contain and expand me, marking the entire footprint of a life.”

After 25+ years on 55 acres on a dirt road in northern Maine, Jakimides (jah KI mih deez) lives in downtown Bangor.