Naomi Klouda

"Anna's Whale" won recent recognition! The Anchorage Daily News book reviewers named it a favorite for 2025 among the impressive likes of Eowyn Ivy's "Black Woods, Big Sky," and Marybeth Holleman's "Bloom Again." Sadly, "The Alaska Glacier Dictionary" wasn't reviewed in a traditional newspaper review, though it garnered a big write-up in that newspaper as well as a lot of press through Public Radio, National Native News, and newspaper articles around the state.

As many of you know by now, I like to write about the natural world around me in Alaska, a topic I find endlessly interesting, from the oddities of glaciers to the peculiar, stupendous lives of whales. As a grandmother now and a semi-retired journalist, there's more time to revise and work anew on stories that were set aside while working on a daily deadline. I wrote award-winning stories for the Anchorage Daily News, the Anchorage Times, the Tundra Drums in Bethel, the Kodiak Daily Mirror, the Anchorage Chronicle, the Valley Frontiersman in Palmer, the Homer Tribune, and the North Star Catholic News.

Several newspapers "folded" either while I wrote for them or afterwards. These were casualties of our time: the print versions could not financially sustain changes to readers' tastes wrought by the Internet. It did break my heart, but here I am, retired now - mostly - and following my heart's desire to write of glaciers and whales. How poetically rewarding is that?

I'm working now on another novella, or maybe it will be a collection of the short stories I've been working on individually for a number of years. Either way, it will involve Alaska's nature scenes, which feed me both spiritually and as an artist. I hope my writings give readers that magic to hold onto: a good book loaded with heart, history and science enough to ponder as you move about your own lives.