Photo by Alan J. Parks.

About Nancy Lord

Nancy Lord grew up in New Hampshire and moved to Homer, Alaska in 1973 with her partner, Ken Castner. Although neither of them had ever been to Homer before or knew anyone there — they chose the town from a map, based on the size of its dot at the end of a road — Homer turned out to be the right place. It is known today as a vibrant arts community and regularly makes lists of "best" small towns.

Like most Alaskans, Nancy has worked at many, mostly seasonal jobs over the years. She has worked in a cannery, for the weather service, as a hotel maid, as owner/manager of a sporting goods store, at a salmon hatchery, as an aide to members of the Alaska Legislature, as a commercial salmon fisherman, as a lecturer on a cruise ship, and as an adjunct and visiting teacher of creative writing. She has also always written — fiction and nonfiction, books and essays and articles, radio commentaries. Most of her published work is drawn from Alaskan material or themes. "It’s not that I write about Alaska," she says. "Rather, this place is full of such extraordinary stories and landscapes, I’m most interested in exploring narratives and metaphors to comment in a fresh way upon what we, humans, are doing in, and to, the larger world."

Nancy is the author of three short fiction collections: The Compass Inside Ourselves (Fireweed Press, 1984), Survival (Coffee House Press, 1991), and The Man Who Swam with Beavers (Coffee House Press, 2001). She is better known for her three literary nonfiction books: Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore (Island Press, 1997), Green Alaska: Dreams from the Far Coast (Counterpoint Press, 1999), and Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale’s Truths. For many years she also wrote and recorded commentaries for NPR’s Living on Earth. Her stories and essays have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sierra, North American Review, More, and Fourth Genre. Her work is also well anthologized. A story, "Candace Counts Coup" appeared in the 2003 Pushcart Prize XXVII, and an essay, "In the Giant’s Hand," appeared in Travelers’ Tales Alaska. She has received two individual artists fellowships from the Alaska State Council on the Arts, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writing Conference, and numerous fellowships for writing residencies at such places as the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, and Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers. Some of her work has been translated into Russian and Chinese.

Educationally, Nancy is a graduate of Hampshire College, where her liberal arts studies emphasized American Studies, and earned an M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing workshops and classes in nature and memoir writing for many years at the Kachemak Bay Campus of Kenai Peninsula College/University of Alaska, and she has taught in the graduate writing program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She has been a visiting writer in Alaska schools from Unalaska to Pelican and at colleges and institutes from Maine to Texas. She is a regular faculty participant at the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference in Homer.

Nancy’s personal interests include working for conservation and community-building causes. She was the 1994 recipient of the Alaska Conservation Foundation’s Celia Hunter Award for "exemplary volunteer service to the environmental movement in Alaska" and was a founding member (and past president) of both the Kachemak Bay Conservation Society and the Alaska Marine Conservation Council. Her current volunteer work includes chairing a capital campaign to raise funds for a new Homer Public Library.

She also is extremely fond of long beach walks.