Hi! I'm Laurel Downing Bill, author of the Aunt Phil's Trunk Alaska history series.

I am a third-generation Alaskan, wife, mother and grandmother who spent most of her adult life in the remote Alaska village of King Salmon. My biologist husband and I raised three lovely children – two daughters and one son – in a town that only had one stop sign.

We retired into the big city of Anchorage in 1997 when all the kids had graduated high school and went off to college. That's when I learned that I had a passion for writing ... but I found that passion in a weird way.

My Dad’s older sister, Phyllis Downing Carlson, willed me a strange inheritance after she died in 1993: her entire life’s work of research into the extraordinary history of my great state of Alaska. The trunk contained her notes, research and rare Alaska history books she'd collected during her 80-plus years in the Last Frontier.

It turns out I also have a love for history, and I felt a deep responsibility to do something with this gift. So I returned to college (in my 50s) and graduated with a degree in journalism and a minor in history from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2003.

Then I sorted through Aunt Phil’s notes, organized her work into periods of time and began researching on my own to fill in some holes for pieces of history that I thought important. Once the research was complete, I began writing short stories about the events, people and places that helped make Alaska what it is today and searched for hundreds of historical photographs to complement the storytelling.

The result of my labors became the five-book Aunt Phil’s Trunk Alaska history series, which earned the 2016 gold medal for Best Nonfiction Series from Literary Classics International. Each book features a different period of time in Alaska’s colorful past.

I also developed a full curriculum with student workbooks and teacher guides for classroom and home-school use, which won the silver medal in the Education Category from Literary Classics International in 2018. (A college book took gold.) And most recently, Aunt Phil's Trunk earned the 2020 Best of Anchorage in education award.

Now check out my special video message just for you in the next section.