Biography
Sherry Simpson is an associate professor in the Creative Writing and Literary Arts Department at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She also teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. Though her writing is often characterized as "nature" or "outdoor writing," she is more interested in exploring the ways in which people use nature, wilderness, animals, and cultural icons to define themselves and understand the world.
She grew up in Juneau and attended the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she studied biology and journalism. Before earning a MFA degree at University of Alaska Fairbanks she worked as a reporter for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the Juneau Empire, and KTOO-FM public radio, as well as writing columns, articles, and reviews for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska magazine, The Paper, the Anchorage Press, the Washington Post, Newsday, the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Summit, Backpacker, and other publications. Among her awards are the Chinook Literary Prize from Sasquatch Books for her first collection of essays, The Way Winter Comes: Alaska Stories, which was also a finalist in the Bakeless Nonfiction contest; the Andres Berger Nonfiction Award; the Sierra magazine Nature Writing Contest; the Ben Franklin award in the essay/photographic category for Glacier Bay National Park; and numerous reporting awards from the Alaska Press Club and the Northwest Regional Society of Professional Journalists.
Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including: In Fact, a collection of the best writing from Creative Nonfiction journal; On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors; American Nature Writing; Another Wilderness; Going Alone; and Living Blue in the Red States.
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