Helen Frost was born in South Dakota in 1949, the fifth daughter in a family of eight girls and two boys. She studied at Syracuse University, graduating in 1971. Since then she has lived in Scotland, Vermont, Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, California, and Indiana, where she now lives with her husband Chad Thompson and their children, Lloyd and Glen. Many of her poems in this collection draw from her experiences living in Telida, Alaska, a small Athabascan village near Mt. McKinley. She is the editor of the anthology, Season of Dead Water (Breitenbush, 1990), and her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Calliope, Calyx and The Fiddlehead. She is the 1993 recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Award.