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Cindy Lou Aillaud is the author/photographer of the award-winning book, Recess at 20 Below.  Cindy Lou was a teacher in Arctic Village and Delta Junction.  She has been a classroom, special education and/or physical education teacher for 23 years.  Her honors and awards include traveling to Japan on a Fulbright Memorial Fund Scholarship, being one of 39 DisneyHand Teachers in 2004, in 2006 she was one of 20 USA Today Teachers and the Alaska Elementary Physical Education Teacher of the year. She lives in Delta Junction and stays busy visiting schools all across the globe encouraging kids to write their own stories.

Gerri Brightwell was brought up in south Devon.  She has master’s degrees in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and a doctorate in literature from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, with her husband and three sons, and teaches in the creative writing programme at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Her first novel, Cold Country, was published in 2003.  Her latest novel, The Dark Lantern, is set in late Victorian London, and was published by Crown in March, 2008.

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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.

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.

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Carolyn Kremers grew up in Colorado and has been a resident of Alaska for 22 years.  She writes literary nonfiction and poetry, and spends as much time as possible outdoors.  In a former life, she was a member of the English/Creative Writing faculty at Eastern Washington University, where she designed and implemented the MFA curriculum in literary nonfiction.  She has also taught for the Fairbanks school district and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  For 2008-09, she has received a U.S. Fulbright Scholar award to teach in the Russian Federation at Buryat State University in Ulan Ude, just north of Mongolia.  Kremers is the author of Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup’ik Eskimo Village and co-editor of The Alaska Reader: Voices from the North.  Her essays and poems have appeared on public radio and in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies.  Subjects of her writing include Alaska, the Inland Northwest, the natural world, conservation and development, indigenous peoples, women, education, music, wonder, and change.

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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. Released recently, Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska is a compilation of his essays and photographs. He is working on a novel.  He lives with his wife and daughter in Northwest Alaska.

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Nancy Lord lives in Homer and teaches creative writing at the Kachemak Bay Campus of the University of Alaska and in UAA's new low-residency MFA program. She is the author of six books--three of short fiction and three of creative nonfiction, and is under contract for two more nonfiction books.  A former commercial fisherman and a sometimes cruiseship naturalist, her interests largely surround Alaskan history, natural history, and contemporary culture.

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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.

John Morgan studied with Robert Lowell at Harvard, where he won the Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry.  In 1976, he moved with his family to Fairbanks.  Here he helped found the Midnight Sun Writers’ Conference and served for many years as co-director of the UAF Creative Writing program.  He has published three books of poetry as well as four chapbooks and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and many other magazines, as well as in more than a dozen anthologies, including The Ardis Anthology of New American Poetry, The Alaska Reader, and Under Northern Lights.   His wife Nancy is a music teacher and a member of the Fairbanks Symphony.  They have two sons, Ben, a musician, and Jeff, a poet.

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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.

Loretta Outwater Cox is an Iñupiaq 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.

Author and illustrator Ram Papish combines his background in fine art with his experiences working as a field biologist to create artistic, yet accurate, wildlife images.

Ram’s interest in wildlife has led him to work on field biology projects in many locations: from Panama to Puerto Rico, Florida to Texas, Jamaica to the outer islands of Hawaii. His strongest interest over the years has been studying the wildlife of Alaska. He has worked in the state for 12 field seasons. The Little Fox is the result of spending eight summers on Alaska’s remote Pribilof Islands. 

Ram’s books tell a story, while educating the reader about wildlife and natural history topics.   He lives near Newport, Oregon with a goldfish, three chickens and one Chia pet.

Trained as a marine biologist, Eva Saulitis has spent 21 years studying the killer whales of Prince William Sound. In 1999, she received an MFA in creative writing from UAF, and since that time, her poems and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and Cimarron Review. Her first book is Leaving Resurrection (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2008), a collection of essays.  As a contributor to Homeground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez, she has read her work on the PBS radio series Living on Earth. She lives in Homer, Alaska, where she teaches writing at the Kachemak Bay campus of UAA.

Born in Bridgeport, Conn., nature writer Bill Sherwonit has called Alaska home since 1982, when he began work at The Anchorage Times. He’s been a fulltime freelance writer since 1992 and in recent years has become ever more interested in literary journalism and creative non-fiction writing, especially the personal essay/narrative form. Sherwonit has contributed essays and articles to a wide variety of newspapers, magazines, journals, and anthologies; his essay “In the Company of Bears” was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007. He is also the author of 11 books about Alaska; his most recent is Living with Wildness: An Alaskan Odyssey, published in 2008 by the University of Alaska Press. Sherwonit lives in Anchorage’s Turnagain area, where he writes about the wildness to be found in Alaska’s urban center as well as in the state’s most remote wilderness areas. In his spare time, he teaches nature and adventure/travel writing. 

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Marianne Schlegelmilch has spent her adult life working as a Registered Nurse. Her first book, Solo Flite-An Alaskan Puppy Becomes a Legend, was written as a fundraiser for the Blood Bank of Alaska and has sold over four thousand copies.

Her new book,  Raven's Light-A Tale of Alaska's White Raven, is a fictional account of human’s and raven’s encounters with each other and with the white raven said to inhabit the Fairbanks area. Using cover art commissioned especially for this book, she teams up with Fairbanks artist Fred Freer for the release of Raven’s Light.

Now retired from nursing, Marianne has begun to develop her writing, weaving the beauty of Alaskan life into stories that explore human’s walk on earth.

Martha Shulski published her first book, The Climate of Alaska, in late 2007.  Her interest in weather and climate stemmed from an early age with a childhood of watching severe weather on the Great Plains and from an amateur meteorologist father.  Her educational background is diverse with degrees in meteorology, agronomy, and soil science.  Currently, she is a service and research climatologist with the Geophysical Institute at UAF and teaches in the UA Geography Program.  Her climate summaries on Alaska can be found in news media across the state and in Weatherwise magazine.  Martha and her husband, John, have lived in Fairbanks since 2002. 

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Peggy Shumaker's 2007 release, Just Breathe Normally (University of Nebraska Press), is a moving memoir of childhood and family. In lyric prose Shumaker plumbs the depths of love and forgiveness in the process of healing both body and psyche.   Her most recent book of poetry  Blaze, is a collaboration with the painter Kesler Woodward (Red Hen Press).  She teaches in the low-residency MFA Rainier Writing Workshop.

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Said to be "afflicted with an unremitting sense of the absurdity" Jamie Smith is the creator of the cartoon features "Nuggets"  and "FreezeFrame", which have been appearing weekly in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner (Sunday edition) for the last twenty years.

Originally from Western and Central New York, he grew up hiking the forests of the Allegheny, Catskill and Adirondack mountains before migrating to the Interior of Alaska, where he has trekked across much of the state on long-distance solo backcountry trips.

Along with holing up in his cabin doing freelance illustration and working on upcoming book-length projects, he teaches studio art classes in drawing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Ron Smith, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, taught eighteen different biology classes during his 31-year career. In that time he enjoyed research and publishing forty-four papers in refereed scientific journals. He took his students on many field trips into outdoors Alaska and on weekends he and his family and friends spent time hiking, canoeing, hunting and running. His recently published book, Interior and Northern Alaska: A Natural History, describes the landscapes, processes, plants and animals of the Great Land he loves. The book combines science narrative with personal observations and experiences.

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.

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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.

2008 Book Festival Keynote Speaker

Ray moved to the Northwest in the late 1970s and eventually on to Alaska in the early '80s, with a couple of art degrees in his back pocket and a life-long interest in natural history. He settled in the rain-swept coastal city of Ketchikan and began producing offbeat fish-filled T-shirts that soon gained him an audience with cannery workers, anglers, commercial fishers, and scientists. His collaborations with the scientific community eventually led to exhibitions at major museums across the United States.  Click here to read more.

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Born in Aiken, South Carolina in 1951, Kesler Woodward has been an Alaska resident since 1977. He served as Curator of Visual Arts at the Alaska State Museum and as Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Center of Alaska before moving to Fairbanks in 1981. He is currently Professor of Art,
Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he taught for two decades, serving as Chair of the Art Department and as Chair of the Division of Arts and Communications. He retired from teaching to paint full time in the spring of 2000.