About

I”m a long-time Alaskan with more than 35 years of experience as a wildlife and habitat biologist, environmental educator, and science communication specialist throughout the state, including more than a decade as a naturalist and director of the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies based in Homer. I have a Master’s degree in wildlife management from UAF and am a recent graduate of the UAA Creative Writing and Literary Arts MFA program. My essays have been published in the Alaska Quarterly Review and We Alaskans and two received Honorable Mention in the Nonfiction category of the UAA/Anchorage Daily News Creative Writing  Contest (now also hosted by the Alaska Center for the Book). See my bio for more details  – both literary and my experience in Alaska science and environmental education and outreach.

Entangled: People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay is my first book, to be published in February 2018, by the University of Alaska Press. The ShiftingAlaskaBaselines.com website will provide “news” about the long-term changes in the Alaskan environment and how people have and are trying to now to cope psychologically with environmental change.

AlaskaScienceLit Blog
Science and creative writing are two topics that don’t seem to go together very well, but Alaska has a plethora of creative writers who craft prose both factual and lyrical and who are seriously and accurately scientific while letting us know they are oh, so human, in the broadest sense. Now, more than ever, we need to combine the rigorous approach of the scientific method to our natural world with our appreciation and love of the interrelated, dynamic cosmos into which we are interwoven. Maybe we can gain some insight into how we got into the mess we’re in as the Arctic sea ice melts. And how to survive and thrive in our changing world.