Nicole Schmitt is the executive director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for protecting Alaska’s wildlife.
Dana Stabenow is a Homer-based author and the founder of Storyknife, a writers’ retreat for women. Her latest book is Spoils of the Dead.
Lydia Dirks is a 20-year-old Unangax̂ artist living in Unalaska. Her work focuses on cultural revitalization and healing.
Linda Behnken has fished commercially off Alaska since 1982 and since 1991 has worked to promote sustainable fisheries.
Crystal Worl is an owner of Trickster Company, a Juneau-based business that features Alaska Native design, artwork, and jewelry.
Katie Ione Craney is an artist based in Haines who primarily works with scrap material and found objects.
Stephen W. Haycox is an author and emeritus professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Kyle Hopkins. Photo courtesy Anchorage Daily News. Kyle Hopkins, 43, is a reporter and editor at the Anchorage Daily News. Hopkins was a reporter on the series “Lawless,” a collaboration between the ADN and ProPublica that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The Pulitzer board called the body of work “a riveting series that revealed a third of Alaska’s villages had no police protection, took authorities to task for decades of neglect, and spurred an influx of money and legislative changes.” “One thing that was really instrumental and important to me early in the reporting was learning about a lawsuit about 20 years ago by several tribes that were saying if the state wasn’t going to support local means of tribal justice than it had a duty to provide the most basic of public safety services in villages, in the same way that you can’t just not provide…
Golga Oscar, a Yup’ik artist from Kasigluk, blends traditional and contemporary material. He made a sealskin medicine bag over a month during the pandemic.