2011 Faculty
This year we have invited a few people back: Peggy Schumacher, Kim Heacox, Dan Henry, Jeff Brady, Buckwheat, Heather Lende, Tim Woody.
Stay tuned for additional faculty members to be named at a later date.
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. In December 2010 Alaska Governor Sean Parnell named Peggy, Alaska State Writer Laureate.
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.
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.
Heather Lende
Heather Lende is the author of If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name and Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs. She writes a column for Woman’s Day magazine and the Alaska Dispatch and obituaries for the Chilkat Valley News. Her essays and commentary have appeared on NPR, and in the Washington Post, New York Times, Anchorage Daily News, and in Country Living, Sunset, Alaska and National Geographic Traveler magazines. She is the mother of five children and has one grandchild. Her family lives in Haines, Alaska, but her dog, Forte, is originally from Skagway.
Deb Vanasse
Deb Vanasse is the author of several books for children and adults, including the Junior Literary Guild selection A Distant Enemy. Her most recent book is Lucy’s Dance, published by the University of Alaska Press for June 2011 release. An Alaskan for over thirty years, she lived in the villages of Nunapitchuk, Tuluksak, and Akiachak before moving to Bethel and Fairbanks. In 2010, she became one of the founding Directors of 49 Writers, Inc. and now serves as Program Director of the 49 Alaska Writing Center, where she teaches writing and blogs at www.49writers.blogspot.com. Deb lives in Anchorage and retreats to a cabin near the Matanuska Glacier whenever she gets a chance.
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's first book, The Woman Who Married a Bear, was published in 1993 and won the Shamus Award for the Best First Mystery of that year. His third book, The Music of What Happens, won the 1997 Spotted Owl Award for Best Northwest Mystery.
Lynn Schooler
Lynn's first book, The Blue Bear, won the French literary prize Prix Littéraire 30 Millions d'Amis (Thirty Million Friends), as well as being named the Editors at Amazon.com's #1 choice for Nature Writing in 2002 and a Notable Book by the Kiriyama Prize for promoting cross-cultural communications. The prize money from Thirty Million Friends was donated to the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. In 2011, The Blue Bear was adapted as a stage production by Perseverance Theater in Juneau. His most recent non-fiction, Walking Home; A Traveler in the WIlderness, a Journey into the Human Heart, was awarded the 2010 Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival's 'Best Mountain LIterature' award and listed as a 'Best Alaska Books of 2010' by the Anchorage Daily News. His first novel, Heartbroke Bay, published under the pseudonym Lynn D’Urso, was a finalist for the 2010 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. He has lived in Alaska for forty years, working as a wilderness guide, commercial fisherman, shipwright, and award winning wildlife photographer.
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.
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
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.
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.).
Seth Kantner
Seth Kantner is a commercial fisherman, wildlife photographer and author of Shopping for Porcupine and the national bestselling novel, Ordinary Wolves. He was born and raised in northern Alaska, schooled at home and living off the land, and later attended the University of Montana and received a BA in journalism. His writings and photographs have appeared in the New York Times, Outside, Alaska, Reader's Digest, and other places. He’s a former columnist for the Anchorage Daily News, and bi-monthly dispatch writer on climate change in the Arctic for Orion magazine, and now has returned to focusing on fishing and fiction. He lives with his wife and daughter in northwest Alaska.
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.
Terry Reilly
Terry Reilly is Professor of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, surveys of world literature, and special topics seminars on Doris Lessing and Thomas Pynchon. In addition to writing on the works of Lessing, Pynchon, and genre studies, he has published a number of articles on Renaissance literature and law and is on the editorial board of the Oklahoma City University Law Review. He is currently working on a collection of nonfiction essays and book on neuroscience and literature tentatively titled Lobotomy and Literature in British and American Cultures, 1935-1962.