Lisa Maloney is the author of three guidebooks: Day Hiking Southcentral Alaska, 50 Hikes Around Anchorage, and Moon Alaska. She will describe how the two great passions of her life—hiking and Irish dance—enabled her to emerge from a painfully shy person and taught her to embrace the vulnerable place where true communication happens.

A resident of Alaska for more than 25 years, Lisa is a former outdoors columnist for The Anchorage Press, has covered a nationwide hiking and backpacking beat for a travel website, and served as senior editor at Alaska magazine. She contributes outdoors and lifestyle articles to several publications.

Lori Townsend is the News Director for Alaska Public Media. In addition to herding the newsroom cats, she also offers edits and advice to reporters in public broadcasting newsrooms across the state and hosts weekly, statewide public affairs programs. She has been a reporter for nearly 25 years and has lived in Alaska for 20 of them. Her reporting work has taken her to communities across the Lower 48, Canada and Alaska.

She is the recipient of numerous journalism awards and has had fellowships at the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting and The Berkeley Center for Digital Media, as well as a short intensive at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Lori also has written two novels—American Home Wrecker and Ghost Ship—and is anticipating publication of her third mystery this fall.

Lori Townsend