Judy Shuler

Author Judy Shuler grew up in a Midwest farm family with newspapers covering the kitchen table and magazines spilling from shelves. After earning a journalism degree at the University of Wisconsin and working in a St. Paul, MN newsroom, she moved to Anchorage on a two-year federal contract. She planned to return home after it ended. But within a few months she discovered that in Alaska, she was home.

It was a move that would define the rest of her life.

There she resumed writing for newspapers and magazines. Eventually the state's captivating natural history led her to create Alaska Up Close, a sight-seeing and travel planning service centered around outdoor photography, wildlife viewing, and the mind-numbing beauty that continues to bring people to Alaska.

Her first book, Red & Blue: A Memoir of Two Alaskan Tour Guides, was written with colleague Hildegard Ratliff. It recounts stories of their years in tourism and focuses on the natural setting of Southeast Alaska.

Safe Harbor: Stories of Enduring Friendship is an homage to the role of friendships in our lives, with stories of a wide variety of friendships that span age, backgrounds, time and distance. The Anchorage she found as a young adult was a city of newcomers. Through friends they wove a family of their own making. Friends who would follow her through time zones and zip codes. It was the beginning of the central role of friendship in her life. The book was inspired years later by a simple act of kindness in a time of loss.

You Too Can Haiku: Journaling in Three Lines celebrates the joy and challenge of brevity in Japanese poems with just 17 syllables. Each page has space to write two haiku on that date, along with one written by the author.

Her most recent book, The Nazi’s Daughter, is a work of fiction inspired by lived experiences of the children of World War II. Though they did not ask for that war, repercussions have dogged them throughout their lives.