Lael Morgan

Lael Morgan, was born in rural Maine and has lived more than half her life in the wilds. She started her writing career as a reporter for the Malden Press in Massachusetts. Later she became a photojournalist at the Juneau Empire in Alaska's capitol city, and then covered crime, politics and the old red light district for the Fairbanks Daily News Miner just south of the Arctic Circle.

In 1968, Morgan began a five-year stint at the Los Angeles Times, and then returned to the Far North for assignments with National Geographic, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and Alaska Magazine.

In 1988 she joined the Department of Journalism and Broadcasting, University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she taught writing, photography and multimedia for 12 years. In 1999 she became managing editor and later publisher of the Casco Bay Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Portland, Maine. Then, motivated by a low threshold of boredom in 2003, she moved south to Arlington, Texas, where she went to work for the Department of Communication, University of Texas Arlington.

Morgan has authored more than a dozen books including Good Time Girls of the Alaska Yukon Gold Rush which in 1998 won her the title of Historian of the Year from the Alaska Historical Society. Art and Eskimo Power: The Life and Times of Alaskan Howard Rock, a book she wrote in 1988, has been included in a listing state’s best nonfiction books.

Her most recent publications include Wanton West: Madams, Money, Murder and the Wild Women of Montana’s Frontier and Kitchen Stories Cookbook: Comfort Cookin’ Made Fascinating and Easy which is co-authored by Linda Altoonian.

Morgan resides in Anchorage where she she is a consultant for Epicenter Press and teaches media writing online for the University of Texas at Arlington.