Background

Kirkpatrick Hill was born on April 30, 1938 and was raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. She is the daughter of William Clifton Hill, a mining engineer, and Isabel Stirling Matson, an office worker.

Education

Kirkpatrick Hill attended the University of Alaska. In 1969 she received a Bachelor of Science from Syracuse University.

Career

Hill began her career as an elementary school teacher. She worked as a teacher for more than thirty years, most of that time in the Alaskan bush. When circumstances allowed her the time, she decided to try her hand at writing a children’s book.

With the editor’s help, Toughboy and Sister was published in 1990. The book tells the story of two Athabascan Indian children, who are forced to survive on their own after their mother dies during childbirth and their father, an alcoholic who cannot get over the loss of his wife, meets his death in a boating accident at a fishing camp on the Yukon River. Eleven-year-old John and his sister, nine-year-old Annie Laurie, find themselves left in this remote area and must rely on their wits to survive.

In Hill’s second novel, 1994’s Winter Camp, Toughboy and Sister return, children have found a new home with their neighbor, an elderly Alaskan woman named Natasha, who brings them with her to her winter trapping camp during the month of October. Falls through the ice, attacks by moose, and the endless search for enough firewood to keep the trappers warm punctuate an experience during which Sister learns to abhor the cruelty of animal trapping.

In her third novel, The Year of Miss Agnes, Hill introduces readers to ten-year-old Frederika, whose feelings about schoolwork change drastically when a new teacher named Miss Agnes comes to the small, one-room schoolhouse in Frederika’s remote Abathascan village. While many teachers have come and gone - some lasting only a few weeks - Miss Agnes is here to stay and inspires Fred and her friends with her creativity and excitement over learning.

Do Not Pass Go, Deet is a middle grader whose world comes crashing down when his stepfather, Charley, is arrested and sent to jail for possessing drugs. In addition to causing him to reevaluate his feelings toward Charley, Deet's reaction to having a parent in prison—including his self-absorbed worries about what his friends at school will think about him—gradually gives way to the realization that many of his assumptions about people are worth reexamining.

Set in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Dancing at the Odinochka follows a girl's coming of age as she grows up in the isolation of a Russian Alaskan trading post. Erinia Pavaloff lives on a cultural divide; her father is half Russian and half Tlingit while her mother is Athabascan, and her parents' trading post is located on the physical border between these same two worlds. A local murder threatens to inflame local cultural differences, and when the region is annexed to the United States, Erinia and her neighbors must learn to adapt to a third culture and become American Alaskans.

Turning again to history, Hill presents a contribution to Pleasant Company's popular "Girls of Many Lands" series in Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway. Featuring illustrations by Patrick Faricy, the middle-grade novel finds twelve-year-old Minuk watching as her family's Eskimo traditions give way to Western ways after Christian missionaries arrive in their Yup'ik village.

Achievements

• Kirkpatrick Hill's books Toughboy and Sister, Winter Camp, and The Year of Miss Agnes have all been immensely popular. Her fourth book, Dancing at the Odinochka, was a Junior Library Guild Selection. Kirkpatrick was a Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award finalist. She has also received nominations for the Young Hoosier Award, William Allen White Children’s Book Award, Rebecca Caudill Young Reader’s Book Award, Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children’s Book Award, Penn, Norma Klein Award, and the Nebraska Golden Sower Award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Winter Camp

    (Two orphaned siblings struggle to survive a harsh Alaskan...)

    1993
  • Dancing at the Odinochka

    (In the 1860s, Erinia Pavaloff's life at a trading post in...)

    2005
  • Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway

    (Twelve-year-old Minuk's traditional Eskimo way of life is...)

    2002
  • Bo at Ballard Creek

    (This is the unforgettable story of a little girl growing ...)

    2013
  • The Year of Miss Agnes 2000
  • Miss Agnes and the Ginger Tom 2011
  • Bo at Iditarod Creek 2014
  • Toughboy and Sister 1990
  • Do Not Pass Go 2007

Interests

• music, art history, cooking, books, animals, film

Connections

Kirkpatrick Hill is divorced. She is the mother of six children - Matt, Shannon, Kirk, Crystal, Mike and Sean and the grandmother of eight.