Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News. Used with permission.

Please see the News and Events page for my most current information, scheduled events, and the availability of my new book Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life. See also the side links about my appointment as Alaska's Writer Laureate (or State Writer.) Btw, that beluga I'm sitting on in the photo is not a real animal! It's a sculpture, some of the public art at the Bird Point rest stop along Turnagain Arm south of Anchorage.

"Nancy Lord is one of Alaska’s prominent writers ... Lord is not a short-term visiting observer, but one who lives on the Cook Inlet coastline, who fishes in season, and is centered on the land and the sea life to be found there. She writes exceedingly well, with deep, informed understanding of the people, the region, and the issues involved."

— Poet John Haines

Nancy Lord writes both fiction and literary nonfiction from her home base in Homer, Alaska. Her work is informed by a deep connection to the landscape and culture of the place she calls home. As a commercial salmon fisherman for twenty-five years (now retired), she takes a particular interest in coastal Alaska and the sustainability of its resources and communities.

Nancy's newest book is Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life (University of Nebraska Press, 2009.) As she writes in the preface, "This book is a collection of writings, mostly from the last decade, that, taken together, present my life along its path of determining who I would be and what I would care about. I've been fortunate not only to have lived a rich life in a small town touted as 'cosmic' and at our summer fishcamp but to have traveled both within and outside Alaska, and the essays reflect my exploration into all those places and what I found in them."

Nancy’s last book was Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale’s Truths (Counterpoint Press, 2004) and, in paperback Beluga Days: Tracking the Endangered White Whale (The Mountaineers Books, 2007.) In it she examined issues surrounding the depleted (now endangered) population of Alaska’s Cook Inlet beluga whales. Her search took her to villages of Native hunters, out on the water with biologists, and to Canada’s St. Lawrence River, where a similarly isolated beluga population is endangered by industrial contaminants.

"What interested me from the start," she has said about the writing of that book, "is that an animal can be so well 'loved' and yet be brought to the brink of extinction. I wanted to understand what factors were involved, so that we might learn more generally about what we can do to conserve and protect our environment and the life it supports. I also wanted to engage readers in a lively narrative that would take them to places and among people they might not otherwise experience, so that they might see for themselves some of what happens in the intersection between nature and culture."

Nancy remains involved in the beluga and other conservation issues and is currently working on a book about how northern communities are coping with climate change.