Christine Byl

Christine Byl is the author of the novel Lookout, short-listed for the Center for Fiction’s 2023 First Novel prize and recipient of a 2023 Montana Book Award Honor, and Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods, a book about trail crews, tools, wildness, gender, public lands, and labor, shortlisted for the 2014 Willa Award in nonfiction.

Winner of the Alaska Literary Award in 2015, Byl’s prose has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, The Sun, Crazyhorse, and Brevity, among other journals and various anthologies. A recipient of multiple grants from the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska State Council on the Arts, Byl has been a fellow at Breadloaf Writers Conference, a writer-in-residence in rural and under-funded public schools, and is a Senior Affiliate editor at the journal Alaska Quarterly Review (AQR). Christine has worked as a professional trail-builder for nearly three decades. She lives with her family in Interior Alaska on the homelands of Dene’ people.