A Conversation with Alaska State Writer Laureates Heather Lende (2021-2024) and Vera Starbard (2024-2026 with Alaska Quarterly Review Editor-in-Chief Ronald Spatz
Heather Lende is the immediate past Alaska State Writer Laureate. Her essays and stories, mostly about life and sometimes death in Haines, Alaska have been distributed widely, from The Anchorage Daily News and Christian Science Monitor to NPR and Country Living. She is a former contributing editor at Woman’s Day magazine and for over twenty years wrote some 400 obituaries for the Chilkat Valley News in Haines. She is the author of bestselling memoirs from Algonquin Books, Find the Good, If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name, Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs, and most recently Of Bears and Ballots in 2020. Her honors include the Alaska Governor’s Award for Distinguished Service to the Humanities, the Episcopal Bishop of Alaska’s Bishop’s Cross Award and the Middlebury College Alumni Award. She is on the faculty of the North Words Writers Symposium. Find the Good was last year’s Alaska Reads pick. Of her work, Booklist wrote: “Lende writes emotionally but never sentimentally, giving us the best Alaska memoir of late, maybe the best ever.”Kirkus Reviews deemed it: “Optimistic, slightly humorous reflections on living a fully engaged, meaningful life.” The Boston Globe observed: “good old fashioned American values coming from small-town Alaska.” Her first creative nonfiction essay “Papa Bob, Doris, Truth, and Memory” appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review in 2022.
VERA STARBARD
Vera Starbard is a Tlingit and Dena’ina writer and editor. She has served as Playwright-in-Residence at Perseverance Theatre through the Andrew W. Mellon National Playwright Residency Program and Editor of First Alaskans Magazine. Vera is also a writer for the PBS Kids children’s program Molly of Denali, which won a Peabody Award in 2020 and was nominated for two Children and Family Emmys in 2022, followed by three nominations in 2023. Starbard’s first commissioned play, “Devilfish,” premiered at Perseverance Theatre in Juneau and Anchorage in 2019. She has won local, statewide and national individual writing and editing awards, including the Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award and Alaska Literary Award. When Vera was selected for the Andrew W Mellon Foundation National Playwright Residency Program in 2016. She was the first Alaskan, and first Alaska Native/American Indian resident in the history of the program. Six new full-length plays were commissioned for the residency and Vera’s first play commissioned through the residency, “Devilfish” premiered at Perseverance Theatre in Juneau and Anchorage in 2019. Vera currently serves on the Howl Round Advisory Council, and Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference Board, as well as serving as a founding member of Alaska Native playwright group Dark Winter Productions. Her full-length play Our Voices Will Be Heard premiered at Perseverance Theatre in 2016. It was then published in the textbook Contemporary Plays by Women of Color in 2017 and turned into a one-hour radio adaptation that aired nationwide in 2018.