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. Selected columns from the Copper River Record comprise Odden's Who's Driving: Windshield Time with a Small Alaska Newspaper. In 2015, she received a
Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award for her work on the essays for Mostly Water, coming from Red Hen Press in spring 2020. She lives with her husband in Nelchina, Alaska.