VELMA WALLIS was born in 1960 in Fort Yukon, a remote village of about 650 people in interior Alaska. Growing up in a traditional Athabaskan family, Wallis was one of thirteen children. When she was thirteen, her father died and she left school to help her mother raise her younger siblings.
Wallis later moved to her father’s trapping cabin, a twelve-mile walk from the village. She lived alone there intermittently for a dozen years, learning traditional skills of hunting and trapping. An avid reader, she passed her high school equivalency exam and began her first literary project—writing down a legend her mother had told her about two abandoned old women and their struggle to survive.
That story became her first book, Two Old Women, published by Epicenter Press in 1993. She is also the author of Bird Girl and the Man Who Followed the Sun and Raising Ourselves: A Gwich’in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River.
An Athabaskan native born in 1946 in the village of Tanana, Alaska, JAMES L. GRANT SR. was adopted and raised James G. Schrock in Southern California. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1967, he was stationed in Europe, where he studied the masters. Later he attended Chaffey Junior College in Alta Loma, California, then returned to Alaska to study the Native Arts at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Besides pen-and-ink drawings, his art includes sculpture, mask making, and oil painting. He lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.
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