Purely Alaska

PURELY ALASKA: Authentic Voices from the Far North includes 32 stories as far flung as Alaska itself, including that of a woman who discovers a surprising new world when she goes off to boarding school; a mother who hopes to steer his son to college, but he wants to be a commercial fisherman like his dad; a life-saving reindeer drive across Alaska; a young man's struggle against powerful addictions; a husband whose after-work snowmachine outing becomes a near-death experience; and an outsider who comes intending to help the village but finds that he is the one needing help.

Susan B. Andrews lives north of the Arctic Circle in Kotzebue, Alaska, with her husband, John Creed, and family. Susan is a professor of journalism and humanities at the Kotzebue branch of the University of Alaska, Chukchi College, where she has taught since 1989. Her students attend class via computer-assisted distance education primarily from remote villages throughout rural Alaska. Prior to joining the UA Faculty, Susan was a television producer for the Kotzebue-based Northwest Arctic Borough School District, creating television documentaries on Alaska Native issues. Before coming to Kotzebue, she was anchor and news director of KTVF-TV, the CBS affiliate in Fairbanks. A former ballet dancer, Susan completed her graduate work in journalism at the University of Oregon following a comparative-literature degree from Smith College in Massachusetts. As an undergraduate she also attended the University of Paris. Professor Andrews is the recipient of a Certificate of Commendation from the American Association for State and Local History. Susan's writing interests include fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. She loves living in Kotzebue for "being able to walk everywhere and having the time with family that otherwise would be spent commuting and running errands."

John Creed is a professor of journalism and humanities at the University of Alaska's Chukchi College in Kotzebue, where has distance taught students throughout Alaska since 1987. Before Joining the UA faculty, he covered business and education for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. He also edited the Tusraayugaat, a bilingual newspaper published in the early 1980s by the Kotzebue-based Northwest Arctic School District. He also has taught school in Sutton, Massachusetts and in Noatak, an Inupiaq village north of Kotzebue. Professor Creed studied English at the University of Massachusetts, Irish literature and history at the University College Dublin in Ireland, physical education at the University of Oslo in Norway, and teacher education at the University of Montana. He completed his graduate work in journalism at the University of Oregon. He enjoys skiing, mountain biking, reading, and writing. The best thing about living in rural Alaska, he says, is "being able to raise a close-knit family at a much slower pace that mainstream American life." In the late 1980s John and Susan founded Chukchi News and Information Service, a cultural journalism project hat features University of Alaska student writing in newspapers, magazines, anthologies, and on websites.