Juneau-based writer Vera Starbard, T’set Kwei, will be Alaska’s next writer laureate.
Starbard is a playwright, magazine editor and Emmy-nominated television writer. She’s Lingít and Dena’ina and grew up all over the state before moving to Juneau two years ago.
State Writer Laureates serve for two years. They focus on a project that promotes literary arts in Alaska. Starbard said she’s looking forward to figuring out what hers will be. She especially wants to uplift Alaska Native storytelling.
“I’m, at the heart of it, just a book nerd,” Starbard said. “I could get people creating more books, or poetry, or plays or TV scripts. That’s fun to think about.”
She said she’s wanted to be a writer since kindergarten. She started out in theater, staging several of her plays at Perseverance Theatre in Juneau before moving into television writing. She also finished a novel that she has yet to publish.
Starbard is possibly most known for her writing on TV shows. She received several Emmy nominations for her work on the PBS Kids show “Molly of Denali” and was a staff writer for ABC’s “Alaska Daily.”
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She said people sometimes don’t take television writing as seriously as other types of writing.
“I haven’t found that to be true in Alaska, and I think it’s kind of a big statement to make, coming from Alaska, that we value all forms of art and writing,” she said.
In fact, Starbard feels that writing scripts has a lot in common with traditional Indigenous storytelling, where there’s more emphasis on dramatic moments.
“I love that about whether it’s stage or television, I feel like those are in some ways even closer than books to what Lingít storytelling was, so that’s kind of fun,” she said.
The Alaska State Writer Laureate program was originally for poets, but expanded to include more genres in the 1990s. Starbard replaces outgoing State Writer Laureate Heather Lende.
Starbard will be honored at the 2024 Governor’s Arts and Humanities Awards at the Anchorage Museum on Oct. 29, along with other award recipients, including University of Alaska Southeast Professor X̱’unei Lance Twitchell.
