Ernestine Hayes

I was born and raised in Juneau, Alaska, when Alaska was still a territory. For the first few years of my life, I lived with my grandmother in the Juneau Indian Village while my mother was in the hospital with tuberculosis. When I was fifteen years old, my mother and I moved to California, where I spent twenty-five long years. I didn't come back home, not even once, although I thought about it every day. Finally, when I turned forty, I said to myself, "Let me go home or let me die trying to get there." It took me eight months to get from San Francisco to Ketchikan, living in my car, standing in food lines, and sleeping in shelters. I finally made it back home two years later. After I came back home, I enrolled at the University of Southeast and received an MFA in creative writing and literary arts from the University of Alaska at Anchorage. For most of those summers, I worked my way through college on the waters of the Inside Passage of Southeast Alaska. I now teach creative writing, composition, and Alaska literature at the UAS Juneau campus. Juneau is my home, and I know I love it more than if I'd never left.