Mary Odden’s essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Northwest Review, Nimrod, the Alaska Quarterly Review, and Under Northern Lights, an anthology of contemporary Alaska art and writing. Born in eastern Oregon, she traveled north to work on forest fires in Alaska. She studied writing at the University of Montana and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She has worked as an aviation dispatcher, village teen counselor, writing teacher, and as publisher/editor of a small newspaper in Alaska’s Copper River Valley. She is the author of Mostly Water: Reflections Rural and North (Boreal Books/Red Hen 2020) and recently released Upcountry Cranberry: A Treasury of Sour, Savory, and Sweet Wild Lingonberry Recipes, a cookbook plus facts, stories and poems about her favorite wild food (a.k.a. known in Alaska as lowbush cranberry). Mary helps other writers birth their self- and traditionally-published books, working as an editor and advisor. Current project is a long fiction about a remote western Alaska town.