Alaska Literary Award, 2024
Talkeetna
Sarah Birdsall has lived in Alaska most of her life, with many of her formative years spent in remote parts of the state. A former award-winning journalist and a Rasmuson Foundation award recipient, she has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage and lives in her hometown of Talkeetna, Alaska, where she’s always writing something.
Sarah is the author of Wild Rivers, Wild Rose (University of Alaska Press, 2020), which was the 2021 WILLA Literary Award Winner in Historical Fiction, and which won a bronze medal in the West-Pacific—Best Regional Fiction category of the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Wild Rivers, Wild Rose was also named as a “Favorite Book of the North from 2021” by the Anchorage Daily News. Other publications include The Red Mitten (McRoy & Blackburn, 2006), which won a bronze medal for best West Coast fiction in the 2007 Independent Publishers Book Awards competition, and The Moonflower Route (McRoy & Blackburn, 2017). A fourth novel, Hill of Dead Horses, is forthcoming from Epicenter Press. Her short fiction has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Alaska Women Speak, and Cirque.