Shelley Gill

Shelley Gill's books on Alaska and the Pacific Northwest have sold more than a million copies since she stopped papering her bathroom with rejection slips and helped start a children's publishing company in Alaska. Her first book, Kiana's Iditarod, was about her own experience as one of the first women to run in the 1,100 mile dog sled race to Nome.

It was rejected by New York editors who felt kids would not be interested in "some story about a dog race in Alaska." "When I read that," Shelley said, shaking her head, "I wondered if that editor had ever even been a kid...much less talked to one! Sometimes you just have to trust your own instincts." Since Kiana's Iditarod , Shelley has written 25 more best-sellers.

"I write about the same stuff I liked to read about when I was a kid," she says. "Kids are excellent judges of good and bad, and there's so much out there that's bad." Shelley was born in Alburquerque, New Mexico and raised in south Florida. "I was a surfer. My only experience with snow was what I saw on Christmas cards."

Shelley drove a Volkswagon bus to Alaska on a 1972 vacation and never came back. She has worked as a stone mason, a wrangler, a pizza cook and a newspaper reporter, editor and publisher.

"I have one simple goal. I want to produce something kids can relate to, a story that knocks their socks off, that fills them with that WOW! feeling. I want kids to say: "THIS is my FAVORITE book!"Shelley lives in Homer, Alaska - a small fishing town on the tip of the Kenai Peninsula with her Mom, her animals and her way cool daughter, Kye.