Oct 22 UAS Evening at Egan Presents: Family, Friends, and Faith in Small Town Alaska

Featuring author, columnist, and commentator Heather Lende

Juneau, Alaska

Date of Press Release: October 18, 2010

"The genuineness of Heather Lende's experience and her thoughtfulness about life's bad breaks and unexpected gifts- expressed so well in her fine and funny writing- makes me want to ordain her as the goddess of good sense and song."- Nancy Lord, Alaska Writer Laureate, 2008-10

Heather Lende of Haines, Alaska, is a prize-winning author, columnist and radio commentator. She will share stories about her life – what it means to be a writer, wife, mother, grandmother, community member, student, and spiritual being in small town Alaska.  She will read excerpts from her work an answer questions. Copies of If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name and Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs: Family, Friends, and Faith in Small-Town Alaska will be available for sale and signing.

Heather Lende's 2005 bestseller, If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name is a National Geographic Traveler Magazine Ultimate Travel Library selection and the recipient of the 2006 AKLA Alaskana Award which honors outstanding adult fiction and nonfiction works about Alaska.  Booklist  called her new memoir, Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs, "The best Alaska memoir of late, maybe the best ever."

Heather has won several Alaska Press Club awards for her essays, radio commentary and her long running Anchorage Daily News column. She has contributed to NPR, the Christian Science Monitor, the Alaska Dispatch and such diverse publications as the N.Y. Times and Sunset Magazine.  Her new column in Woman's Day magazine debuts in November. She also writes the obituaries for the Chilkat Valley News in Haines, Alaska where she has lived with her family since 1984.