June 2, 2019 – North Words #10 is a wrap!  Thanks to all participants and faculty who made the 2019 NWWS another great one for the books!  Check our Facebook page for photo updates from our 10th annual event, and watch for a Gallery a little later this summer on the website. Reminder to get us your evaluations. Planning for the 2020 conference will begin later this summer, and we’ll start making announcements in the fall.

October 26, 2018 – Susan Orlean to keynote 10th annual North Words – We are pleased to announce that best-selling author Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book and The Orchid Thief,  will be the keynote author for our 10th annual symposium on May 29 – June 1, 2019.  She will be joined by Alaska and Northwest authors Ernestine Hayes, Jonathan Evison, Emily Wall, Don Rearden, Nancy Lord, and Terrence Cole. Read more about Ms. Orlean below and in our press release. See this beautiful YouTube video introduction to The Library Book!

Presented by the North Words Organizing Faculty under the fiscal sponsor Skagway Development Corporation – Community Development Services, with generous support from the Municipality of Skagway and additional Sponsors. Meet your writing community at the North Words Writers Symposium in Skagway, Alaska.

2019 Keynote Speaker

Susan Orlean

The New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean has been called “a national treasure” by The Washington Post. Her deeply moving—and deeply humorous—explorations of American stories, both familiar and obscure, have earned her a reputation as one of America’s most distinctive journalistic voices. A staff writer for The New Yorker for over twenty years and a former contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Vogue, she has been praised as “an exceptional essayist” by Publishers Weekly and as a writer who “approaches her subjects with intense curiosity and fairness” by Bookmarks Magazine. Orlean is fascinated by tales of every stripe. Her profiles and interviews for The New Yorker have covered such wide-ranging subjects as Jean Paul Gaultier’s design inspiration, urban chicken farming, the friends and neighbors of Tonya Harding, the contemporary painter responsible for capturing “the art in the Wonder Bread,” and the World Taxidermy Championships. From the everyday to the outlandish, she has an eye for the moving, the hilarious, and the surprising. Her books include: The Library Book, The Orchid Thief, and Rin Tin Tin.  Read Full Bio…