Debra McKinney

Debra McKinney is a fourth generation journalist, born into a family tradition that began when her great-grandmother bought the Hillsboro Argus in Hillsboro, Ore., in 1904. Once Debra got her journalism degree, it was assumed she’d add her name to the masthead of the family paper. She took off for Alaska instead, where she staked mining claims and worked as a surveyor and a cook at remote, helicopter-supported, mineral exploration camps, and where she encountered her first bear, alone, armed with a saucepan inside a Quonset hut.

As a long-time writer for the Anchorage Daily News, she found stories all over the state. She’s interviewed surfers at a secret, fly-in surf spot along the Gulf of Alaska, mountaineers on Mount McKinley, whale researchers surrounded by orcas in Prince William Sound, and Eskimo elders preparing for a young girl’s “First Dance,” a coming-of-age potlatch that drew villagers from all over western Alaska.

Debra received numerous state and regional awards from the Alaska Press Club and the Pacific Northwest Society for Professional Journalism from the mid-1980s until leaving the paper in January 2010. She won the Pacific Northwest’s C.B. Blethen Memorial Award for distinguished feature writing in 1994, and that same year, the national $10,000 Dart Award for coverage of victims of violence. Excerpts from her story of three woman dealing with incest, and an interview with her, appear in Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting About Victims and Trauma, by Roger Simpson and William Cote, published by Columbia University Press, 2000.

Debra was also part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for the People in Peril series on alcoholism and despair among Alaska Native people. Her story, “Youth’s Despair Erupts,” was among the handful chosen from the 10-day series for Pulitzer Prizes: 1989, a Touchstone Book. It was also the only story from the Pulitzer series reprinted in the “Press” section of Popular Writing in America: The Interaction of Style and Audience, fifth edition, published by the Oxford University Press, 1993.

Debra lives in Palmer, AK, with her teacher husband, Paul Morley. In summer, they live at their off-the-grid cabin up north, an oasis of simplicity powered by sun and wind, where they garden, feed mosquitoes, and do some serious hammock time.