Buckwheat
Buckwheat Donahue is the founder of the North Words Writers Symposium. He's lived in Skagway year round since 1984. He grew up in Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas and Wyoming. He walked from Miami, Florida to Whitehorse in the Yukon and then paddled down the Yukon River to Kotlik on the Bering. The journey was a fund raiser for the Skagway Clinic.
His love for his part of the world is un-wavering. Though not a writer himself, he does find great enjoyment in reading. Since the end of last century he's been the Municipality of Skagway's Director of Tourism.
Jeff Brady
Jeff Brady is the editor and publisher of The Skagway News, and also owns Skaguay News Depot & Books and the small press, Lynn Canal Publishing. He has a degree in American Studies from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he also reached the Honors in Creative Writing program, but gave up on a novel to focus on his dream of starting a newspaper in Skagway after graduation.
He is currently editing the book, Skagway, City of the New Century, a 30-year compilation of historical articles - many written by him - that originally appeared in his Skaguay Alaskan visitor guide. It is due out this summer. He is trying to sell the newspaper so he can get back to that novel. He enjoys long river trips with his family, when he has time to ponder life's great questions, like whether to spell the conference's host city with a U or a W.
Peggy Shumaker
Peggy Shumaker's newest book of poems is Gnawed Bones (Red Hen Press, 2010). Her lyrical memoir Just Breathe Normally is now out in paperback from Bison Books/U. of Nebraska Press. She collaborated with artist Kesler Woodward on Blaze, a book of sensual Alaskan paintings and poems. Shumaker watches the Chena River from her window in Fairbanks, where she lives with her husband Joe Usibelli. Professor emerita from UAF, Shumaker teaches in the low-residency MFA Rainier Writing Workshop.
Sherry Simpson
Sherry Simpson is the author of two essay collections, The Accidental Explorer and The Way Winter Comes. She has written essays and articles for numerous magazines, journals, and newspapers. She grew up in Juneau and lives in Anchorage, where she teaches literary nonfiction for the University of Alaska Anchorage's master's program in creative writing. She also teaches with the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, and at the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference in Homer.
Dave Hunsaker
Dave Hunsaker is an Alaskan screenwriter and playwright based in Juneau, Alaska, and Santa Monica, California. As a screenwriter, he has written for directors Robert Redford, Norman Jewison, Julie Taymor, Stanley Donen, Carroll Ballard, Arthur Hiller, Guillermo del Toro, Mel Gibson, and Roger Donaldson, among others. He has also worked with such producers as George DiCaprio, Edward Pressman, David Skinner and Samuel Hadida, along with actor Leonardo DiCaprio. He has written for Fox 2000, Fox Searchlight, Warner Bros, Disney, and HBO.
For ten years he was Artistic Director of the Juneau-based Naa Kahidi Theatre, an international touring company of Native Alaskan artists. His play "Yup'ik Antigone" had a sold-out run in New York and twice represented the USA at festivals in Europe. For five summers he was writer-in-residence for the Breadloaf School of English, Juneau campus. He has written four plays for the New York-based Mettawee River Company, and has had numerous pieces staged at LaMaMa ETC, as well as other theatres in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere.
He is a recipient of the Alaska Governor's Award for the Arts and a Fellowship for the Arts in New York. He is a Fellow of the Sundance Institute, a member of the Writers Guild of America and is an adopted member of the Lukaaxadi Clan of the Tlingit Nation.
Kim Heacox
Kim Heacox lives in Gustavus, Alaska, at the entrance to Glacier Bay National Park, with his wife Melanie. A contract writer with the National Geographic Society for 20 years, he has authored eight books, including An American Idea: The Making of the National Parks which earned him a consultant position on the 2009 Ken Burns 12-hour PBS film. Kim's most recent book, The Only Kayak, a coming-of-middle-age memoir about falling in love with Alaska, was a 2006 PEN USA Literary Award finalist. He has twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for excellence in travel journalism (having worked on assignment all over the world, including more than 30 trips to the Arctic and Antarctic), but these days he prefers to write about community, conservation and the value of staying put. His heroes are John Muir, John Lennon, George Harrison, Oscar Wilde, Cormac McCarthy, Eric Clapton, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey and St. Francis of Assisi.
Dana Stabenow
Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage and raised on 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and found it in writing books. Her first science fiction novel, Second Star, sank without a trace, her first crime fiction novel, A Cold Day for Murder, won an Edgar award, her first thriller, Blindfold Game, hit the New York Times bestseller list, and her twenty-sixth novel and seventeenth Kate Shugak novel, A Night Too Dark, came out in February 2009.
Elisabeth Dabney
Elisabeth Dabney is the managing editor at the University of Alaska Press. She is the senior acquiring
editor focusing on the mission of the press to publish both scholarly and literary works of the circumpolar
North. Since her start at UA Press the press has begun to publish a wider variety of books, including works
of literary non-fiction, poetry, and has begun to fastidiously acquire works of fiction. She enjoys working
with authors at all stages of the acquisition and manuscript editing process. Elisabeth lives in Fairbanks,
Alaska with her husband Jeremiah.
Elisabeth B. Dabney
PO Box 80251
Fairbanks, Alaska 99708
907 474 6389
Kaylene Johnson
Kaylene Johnson is a professional writer and long-time Alaskan who lives in Eagle River, Alaska. Her books include A Tender Distance: Adventures Raising My Sons in Alaska; Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned the Political Establishment Upside Down, Portrait of the Alaska Railroadand Trails Across Time: History of an Alaska Mountain Corridor. Her award winning articles have appeared in Alaska magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Spirit magazine, Parish Teacher and other publications. She holds a BA from Vermont College and an MFA in Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.
Nita Nettleton
Nita Nettleton grew up in Anchorage, "raised by dogs," and has lived in Denali, Talkeetna, Big Lake, Skagway, and Juneau. She worked in tourism, slung hash and weighed trucks before making herself at home in interpretive work with the Forest Service. Writing has always been a hobby for Nita, but got as close to serious as she can manage with a weekly column in the Juneau Empire for which she won an Alaska Press Club award. Tagging along on her husband's retirement, Nita has seen some fabulous scenery in recent years, but has a backlog of Alaska imagery spilling through her keyboard. "If I ever finish that, maybe I can write about somewhere else," she says.
She has a three book series published through McRoy and Blackburn. The series has been referred to as "light hearted chick literature in bunny boots". Another book is scheduled for a late spring or early summer release in 2010.
Tim Woody
Tim Woody is editor of Alaska magazine, the only general-interest, national magazine devoted to covering the state. He began his career as a newspaper reporter for the Arizona Republic in 1987, and later worked as a copy editor for the Mesa (Arizona) Tribune, the The New Mexican (Santa Fe) and the Anchorage Daily News. Along the way, he published occasional features as a freelance writer, and briefly detoured into the aerospace industry as a technical writer. His writing and photography have appeared in the above publications, as well as The Milepost, Dirt Rag magazine and The Ride journal (U.K.).
Dan Henry
Daniel Lee Henry is a lifelong student of rhetoric and communication on the cultural fringe. He coached high school and university debaters over four decades, including University of Alaska debaters to the national championship in 2002. Henry is the founder of the Alaska Native Oratory Society, a statewide organization promoting Native American oral traditions in a performance-competition context.
Since 1980 Henry's writings have appeared in many publications, including seven collections of literary essays like the Pushcart Book of Essays, Book of the Tongass, Traveler's Tales Alaska, and the forthcoming Cold Snaps: Literary Snapshots of Alaska (Univ. of Alaska 2010).
Henry was awarded the Pushcart Prize for nonfiction in 2000 and earned a Pushcart Special Mention in 2004.
Author, radio producer, dramaturge, teacher, and remote settler, Henry lives with his psychotherapist wife and twelve-year-old son on the roadless side of a bay near Haines.
Andromeda Romano-Lax
Born in 1970 in Chicago, Andromeda Romano-Lax worked as a freelance journalist and travel writer before turning to fiction. Her first novel, The Spanish Bow (Harcourt, 2007), was a New York Times Editor's Choice and was translated into 11 languages. Her second novel, The Discus Thrower, enlarges upon themes introduced in her debut novel, including questions about the role of art - and the promise of love - during wartime. Among Romano-Lax's nonfiction works are ten travel and natural history interpretive guidebooks to Alaska and Mexico, as well as a travel narrative, Searching for Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez: A Makeshift Expedition Along Baja's Desert Coast (Sasquatch Books). She lives in Anchorage, Alaska with her husband and two children, and is co-founder of "49 Writers," an organization that offers writing instruction and champions the promotion of literature by Alaska authors. She is the recipient of grants from the Alaska Council on the Arts, and the Rasmuson Foundation, which named her a 2009 Artist Fellow. She blogs several times a week at 49writers.blogspot.com. Her official author website is www.romanolax.com
2010 Schedule
June 2-5, 2010
"Exploring the Frontiers of Language"
Park Service tours of historical sites, Chilkoot trail
Raft 3 miles down the Taiya River
Box lunch
2010 Panel Topics
| Friday, June 4, 2010 | ||
| 8:45 | Plenary Session - AB Hall | |
| I. | 9:15 | Panel Discussion - AB Hall |
| Listening to Ghosts: Making Sense of Old Stories in Back Rooms | ||
| Discussion Focus: Before writers can tell history, they wrestle with research in all its exhilarating, excruciating glory. | ||
| Jeff Brady | ||
| Karl Guerke | ||
| Daniel Henry | ||
| Kim Heacox | ||
| Andromeda Romano-Lax | ||
| Panel Discussion- Presbyterian Church | ||
| The Golden Staircase to Publication | ||
| Discussion Focus: More than a checklist for publication, writers and publishers share on-the-ground lessons toward nudging dreams onto the printed page. | ||
| Elizabeth Dabney | ||
| Dana Stabenow | ||
| Tim Woody | ||
| Kaylene Johnson | ||
| II. | 1:15-3:15 | Panel Discussion- AB Hall |
| Memoir and the Fine Line Between Truth and What Happened | ||
| Discussion Focus: In the literary transformation of one's experience, life's smallest details are indicators of the universal. In the service of storycraft, how important is the truth? | ||
| Kim Heacox | ||
| Elizabeth Dabney | ||
| Sherry Simpson | ||
| Peggy Shumaker | ||
| Kaylene Johnson | ||
| Panel Discussion- Presbyterian Church | ||
| Moving Scenes: Writing for the Camera | ||
| Discussion Focus: From first flash to the final cut, personal journeys from the page to the screen and strategies for the next time. | ||
| David Hunsaker | ||
| Dana Stabenow | ||
| Nick Jans | ||
| III. | 3:30-5:30 | Panel Discussion- AB Hall |
| Creating Characters To Love, Hate, and Remember Forever | ||
| Discussion Focus: Whether in fiction or nonfiction, screen or print, audiences are captured by characters who transcend the greasepaint. What does it take to turn characters into humans? | ||
| Andromeda Romano-Lax | ||
| David Hunsaker | ||
| Kim Heacox | ||
| Sherry Simpson | ||
| Panel Discussion- Presbyterian Church | ||
| Eye of the Beholder: Telling Stories of Extraordinary Persons | ||
| Discussion Focus: Finding a story in the puzzle pieces of a human life is the cautious mission of biographers and historians. | ||
| Kaylene Johnson | ||
| Tim Woody | ||
| Jeff Brady | ||
| Nick Jans | ||
| Elizabeth Dabney | ||
| June 5, 2010, Saturday | ||
| 8:45 | Plenary Session- AB Hall | |
| IV. | 9:00 | Panel Discussion- AB Hall |
| The Hard Cold Facts About Mystery, Murder, and Intrigue | ||
| Discussion Focus: In search of the plot that slayed Colonel Mustard. | ||
| Dana Stabenow | ||
| Nita Nettleton | ||
| Sherry Simpson | ||
| Nick Jans | ||
| Panel Discussion- Presbyterian Church | ||
| Writing Wild: Life Beyond Pavement | ||
| Discussion Focus: The ongoing struggle to write about nature without becoming a nature writer. | ||
| Kim Heacox | ||
| Andromeda Romano-Lax | ||
| Peggy Shumaker | ||
| Daniel Henry | ||