James Barker

James Barker is a commercial photographer, photojournalist, and author skilled in documenting people who live and work in the Polar Regions under challenging conditions.

Karen Brewster
Karen Brewster is a research associate with the Oral History Program at the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks. She moved to Alaska in 1988, and lived in Barrow from 1989 to 1997, where she worked on a subsistence harvest study and was the oral historian for the North Slope Borough's I�upiat History, Language, and Culture Commission. She has worked on Project Jukebox at the UAF Oral History Program since 1998 developing interactive oral history projects for the web using recordings, photographs, text, maps, and video. Her publications include: The Whales, They Give Themselves: Conversations with Harry Brower, Sr.; Alaska Women Write: Living, Loving and Laughing on the Last Frontier; and professional journal articles in Alaska Geographic, Arctic, and Alaska Journal of Anthropology.

Derick Burleson
Derick Burleson is author of Never Night (Marick Press, 2008). His first book, Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-94 won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Burleson's poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, and many other journals. A recipient of a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Burleson teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and lives in Two Rivers.

Ann Chandonnet
Ann Chandonnet is a journalist, poet and non-fiction writer who grew up in Massachusetts and spent the prime of her life in Alaska. She is the author of children's books, cookbooks and history books as well as collections of poetry. Her work also appears in anthologies such as Last New Land and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.

Dermot Cole

Marjorie Kowalski Cole
Marjorie Kowalski Cole is the author of Correcting the Landscape, a novel about Fairbanks which was awarded the 2004 Bellwether Prize. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and newspapers, and she has received poetry awards and honors from Explorations, Glimmer Train, and the Strokestown, Ireland, Poetry Festival. She has called Fairbanks home since 1966, has master's degrees from UAF and University of Washington, and has completed a second novel, A Spell on the Water.

Terrence Cole

Doreen Fitzgerald
Doreen (Dodie) Fitzgerald works as a writer and editor for the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences and continues to write and publish her poetry, some of which has appeared in the local newspaper, The Ester Republic.

Judy Ferguson
Judy Ferguson, a free-lance columnist for the Anchorage Daily News, Life and Arts, Alaskana page as well as a ten-year freelance columnist for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner's Heartland/Sunday Section, is a well-known writer to Interior Alaskans.  Thirty-nine year Alaskan resident, Judy has written two Alaska histories, Parallel Destinies and Blue Hills, stories of the Tanana Valley, as well as children's books, Alaska's Secrete Door, Alaska's Little Chief, the story of the Interior's First Traditional Chief, and newly released Alaska's First People, a presentation of Alaska's indigienous cultures approved by Native educators. She has lesson plans for all five titles.

Jane Haigh
Jane Haigh tells true stories of women, children, (and dogs) of the Alaska Yukon Gold Rush. Her latest book Searching for Fannie Quigley was just published by Swallow Press.

Sarah Isto
Sarah Crawford Isto was born and raised in Fairbanks. Her parents, aunts, and uncles met and married in Fairbanks in the 1920's. Her mining engineer father, Jim Crawford, worked for four decades for the FE Company, which operated dredges in Fairbanks, Nome, Chicken and Hogatza. Her 2007 book, Good Company: A Mining Family in Fairbanks, Alaska, relates the story of this extended family and details of Fairbanks history through the roaring twenties, Depression thirties, World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, and the first years of statehood. Sarah is a retired physician who lives in Juneau but spends March and September at a cabin in the Interior. Before attending medical school, she completed a master's degree in English at the University of Alaska. She has been married to Gordon Harrison for more than thirty years and has one daughter.

Seth Kantner
Born and raised in the Brooks Range, commercial fisherman and author Seth Kantner’s essays, fiction, and wildlife photography have appeared over the last 20 years in magazines in the US, France and Japan. In 2004 he was launched onto the national literary scene with the release of his debut novel Ordinary Wolves. Publisher’s Weekly called it “A tour de force.” The Los Angeles Times named the book “A rare thing of beauty.” His novel became a bestseller, won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and Kantner received a Whiting Award naming him one of the nation’s top ten emerging writers. He is working on a forthcoming compilation of essays and photographs and a second novel. He lives with his wife and daughter in Northwest Alaska.

David Marusek
Longtime Fairbanksan, David Marusek, has been writing science fiction since 1992, when he sold his first short story to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Since then he has published about a story a year in magazines such as, Playboy, Nature, and Asimov’s, and has been excerpted in Scientific American. His stories have appeared in anthologies and in magazines abroad. According to The New York Times, his short fiction "has so far proven to be as concentrated and potent as a dwarf star.” Marusek has raised an amazing daughter and run a small graphic design business. In 2005, his first novel, Counting Heads, was published. Publisher's Weekly says of it, “Marusek's writing is ferociously smart, simultaneously horrific and funny, as he forces readers to stretch their imaginations and sympathies." Marusek has been a finalist for numerous sf awards and in 2000 won the Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short work of science fiction. His debut collection of stories, Getting to Know You, released in April, 2007, has been named a finalist in the 2007 Quill Awards. He is currently working on his second novel, Mind Over Oship.

Charles Mason
Charles Mason is the Department Chair and Professor of Photography and Photojournalism at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In addition to teaching and other university duties, Mason actively pursues personal and assignment photography. He covers Alaska for the Corbis photo agency in New York/Seattle, and is represented by Tony Stone Images/Getty of Seattle/London. His publications include Life, Time, Newsweek, and Outside. He has published two children's books and has co-authored with or provided photography for works by Jennifer Brice, Patti Clayton, and Sherry Simpson. His awards include the Oskar Barnack Award at the World Press Photo Competition and awards at the National Press Photographers Association's Pictures of the Year competition. His work is in the permanent collections at the University of Alaska Museum, the Alaska State Museum, and the Anchorage Museum of History and Art.

Barry McWayne
Photographer and Illustrator

Debbie Miller
Debbie Miller has lived in northern Alaska for 30 years, and has developed a passion for writing nature books about the extraordinary wilderness and wildlife that surrounds her home near Fairbanks. She taught school in Arctic Village, a small village in the Brooks Range and learned about the fascinating culture of the Athabaskan Indians, the natural history of the region, and the wonders of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR. For many years her family has explored this incredible place, studied the great caribou herds, and observed wolves, grizzly and polar bears, musk oxen, migratory birds, and other Alaska animals. Their many outdoor adventures and encounters with wildlife have inspired her to write nature books for children and adults. She is the author of numerous books, including the children’s book Big Alaska and an essay in Arctic Wings: Birds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, both published in 2006.

David Monson

Jean Murray
Jean Murray is a forty-one year resident of Alaska, having lived in Nome, Fairbanks and now in Anderson, Alaska south of Fairbanks (for 36 years.) Her interest in music led to the interest in the music of the Alaska and Yukon gold rushes. It was incubated general exposure to gold rush history and a curiosity about whether they ever sang music in the camps. What fun it was to find out music was a major solace for them. The person who brought an instrument was revered. Their moving diaries and historic archives provided the grounding for "Music of the Alaska/Klondike Gold Rush."

Loretta Outwater Cox
Loretta Outwater Cox is an Inupiaq woman, born in Nome, Alaska, and raised in various villages around the Seward Peninsula. She holds a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s degree in education administration. Loretta taught school in western Alaska for twenty-three years. She and her husband, Skip, have four children and seven grandchildren. She is the author of The Storytellers’ Club: The Picture-Writing Women of the Arctic and The Winter Walk.

Dan O’Neill
Dan O’Neill has written three books of literary non-fiction. A Land Gone Lonesome is literary travel writing centered on a canoe trip along the Yukon River. It won the 2006 Outstanding Alaskana of the Year Award from the Alaska Library Association, and The New York Times Book Review awarded it an “Editor’s Choice.” His first book, The Firecracker Boys, is a political history. It also won the Outstanding Alaskana Award, and for it he was named 1994 Alaska Historian of the Year by the Alaska Historical Society. It is currently under option to HBO for a feature film. The book will be re-released in the fall of 2007. In between these books, he wrote The Last Giant of Beringia (2004) about the Bering Land Bridge. The Times (London) called it “a beautiful and engrossing book…a wonderful integration of science and history.” O’Neill has lived in the Fairbanks area for thirty-two years.

Kim Rich

Linda Schandelmeier
Linda Schandelmeier is the author of Listening Hard Among the Birches, a collection of poetry published by Vanessa Press in 2002. Her poetry is the recipient of many awards, including a Rasmuson Project Award in 2006, and an Individual Artist's Fellowship from the Alaska State Council on the Arts. She has also won the Midnight Sun, Fejes, and Anchorage Daily News-UAA prizes for poetry. Linda is currently working on a book of poetry about the homestead where she grew up. She is a life-long Alaskan and has lived in the Fairbanks area for 40 years.

Mike Sfraga
Mike Sfraga received his Ph.D. in Geography and Northern Studies in 1997. Sfraga's areas of academic concentration are in polar geography, exploration, geography of the circumpolar north, geography of Alaska and the history of field science. He is the author of Bradford Washburn: A Life of Exploration (2004), the first comprehensive biography of celebrated American explorer, Bradford Washburn.

Peggy Shumaker
Peggy Shumaker's newest book is Blaze, a collaboration with the painter Kesler Woodward (Red Hen Press). Her nonfiction book Just Breathe Normally will come out in 2007 from University of Nebraska Press. She teaches in the low-residency MFA Rainier Writing Workshop.

Sherry Simpson
Sherry Simpson is the author of The Way Winter Comes, (Sasquatch Books, 1998) the inaugural Chinook Prize winner from Sasquatch Books. Her work is described by Kirkus Reviews as "A profoundly considered, lyrically wrought, refreshingly hands-on survey of the disappearing frontier in America's wildest state." She has been a Bakeless Nonfiction Scholar at Bread Loaf. She has published essays, columns, articles and book reviews in a variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers. Most recently a series of short essays she wrote appeared in a photographic book on Glacier Bay National Park. She is working on two books: A Nuisance to Myself and Others: Minor Adventures in Postmodern Exploration and In Search of the Last Undiscovered Place.

Frank Soos
Frank Soos is the author of two books of short stories, Early Yet and Unified Field Theory (winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1997). In addition, he has written a book of essays, Bamboo Fly Rod Suite. An as yet untitled book of miniature essays written as companion pieces to artist Margo Klass’s box constructions is forthcoming in 2008. The recipient of NEA and Alaska State Council on the Arts individual fellowships, he is currently working on a novel-in-progress (A Calling), and a book of literary non-fiction about high school basketball in the Southwest Virginia and West Virginia coalfields (The Team We Got). He has over twenty-five years of teaching experience at the high school, undergraduate and graduate levels. In 2004 he retired from eighteen years of teaching in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

John Straley
Novelist John Straley has worked as a secretary, horseshoer, wilderness guide, trail crew foreman, millworker, machinist and private investigator. He moved to Sitka, Alaska in 1977 and has no plans of leaving. John's wife, Jan Straley, is a marine biologist well-known for her extensive studies of humpback whales.

John Taliaferro
John Taliaferro is a former senior editor at Newsweek and the author of In a Far Country: The True Story of a Mission, a Marriage, a Murder, and the Remarkable Reindeer Rescue of 1898, Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore, Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America's Cowboy Artist, and Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He lives in Pray, Montana, and Austin, Texas.

Amber Flora Thomas