Alaska Literary Award, 2024
Utqiaġvik
Todd Sformo is a wildlife biologist in Utqiaġvik, formerly called Barrow, working on fish and bowhead whales in support of subsistence on the North Slope. He views science and the humanities as mutually dependent after studying both—PhD and MS in biology, MFA in creative writing, MA in art history, and BA in philosophy. In addition to publishing scientific papers, he has published prose poems in Hippocampus, Cirque, The Ekphrastic Review and creative nonfiction essays in Catamaran, Interalia Magazine, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.
Todd’s creative writing explores moments of experience and character often ignored in the pursuit of facts. Most recently, his essays examine his dissertation on overwintering physiology of Arctic insects from a humanities perspective, complementing science with a more personal, idiosyncratic view. Rather than focus on scientific challenges such as quantifying variability and uncertainty, he tries to capture his own sense of variability and uncertainty, deciphering how science affects him and how he is an effect, not in a big, ultimate sense but in the little ways that are easily forgotten. He hopes what arises is a portrait of a scientist engaged in a discipline defined by logic but finding errors in reasoning, subject to ego and biases that stand alongside curiosity, wonder, and luck.