We are pleased to present the university community with the 2023 edition of Understory in both a print and an online edition. This volume represents all the aligned subdisciplines of the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Department of English Studies: Language and Linguistics, Creative Writing, Literary Studies, and Rhetoric and Composition. The active and integrative disciplinary learning model we use for Understory supports student success, and its innovative sustainable model involves only nominal direct budgetary costs and proves that excellent initiatives can be highly cost-effective.

Now in its 7th year, the Understory project continues to demonstrate the robustness of English Studies as a discipline, as well as the resilience of our students in the face of the brutal covid-19 pandemic (now entering its 4th year) and many local pressures. On a global scale, the pandemic has also strengthened an assault on the norms and institutions of democratic societies along with the wholesale delegitimization of expertise and scholarship across the academic disciplines. Writ large and small, the very foundations of human achievement in the past and for the future—expertise and scholarship—are at risk. With this volume, however, we offer evidence that human creativity and expertise are still strong, even in the face of such stresses.

Professors David Bowie and Ronald Spatz