East Anchorage Book Club with Andrew Gray

Send us Fan Mail Long-time legislative staffer Buddy Whitt spent his childhood moving frequently thanks to his Air Force father. After high school he joined the Marines. Eight years later he left the military, went to college at Texas A&M, and then landed a job in the hotel industry which ultimately brought him to Anchorage over 20 years ago. He began working in the capitol in 2017 as Chief of...

Send us Fan Mail Without additional funding, the Anchorage School District is facing a $90 million shortfall for the 2026-2027 school year. The pupil-to-teacher ratio is expected to increase by 4. Multiple positions will be cut all over the district, from vice-principals to teachers, from counselors to nurses, from clerks to custodians. Many sports will also be completely eliminated, including swi...

Send us Fan Mail Former US Senator Mark Begich was born in Anchorage in 1962 to, at the time, Alaska State Senator Nick Begich who would go on to become US House Representative in 1970 and whose plane would disappear in 1972. Mark opened the Mother Lode night club when he was 16, was appointed to the youth commission by Mayor George Sullivan in 1980 and served in Mayor Tony Knowles ' administ...

Send us Fan Mail Brian Fechter was the Deputy Commissioner for the Department of Revenue for the state of Alaska from 2021-2023. Brian grew up in Pennsylvania and moved to Alaska in 2012. He worked various financial positions in the state government before becoming Deputy Commissioner of Revenue. In 2023 he became the budget advisor for then Washington Governor Jay Inslee . Last year he moved to I...

Send us Fan Mail Immigration attorney Nicolas Olano was born and raised in Colombia. He moved to Florida for high school, but went back to Colombia for law school. After a short practice there, he decided to return to America where, due to Colombia's different legal education system, he had to attend law school a second time in Florida. He has been practicing immigration law for 24 years. He...

Send us Fan Mail Bolts Magazine Journalist Alex Burness discusses his article from January 8, 2026, “Americans by Name, Punished for Believing it.” The story is an in-depth look at the case of Tupe Smith , an American Samoan woman living in Whittier who was persuaded to run for school board in 2023 and was elected only to learn afterwards that she was unqualified and had actually committed a crime...

Send us Fan Mail  Gov. Mike Dunleavy ’s administration in December 2025 revealed a Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) that omitted nearly $19 million that Anchorage officials expected to use for projects that would make our city's most dangerous roads safer. The Alaska Department of Transportation (DOT) allocated just $9 million for Anchorage projects out of the $77 million total for t...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Shauna Birdsall is a naturopathic doctor with over 25 years of experience in integrative oncology. She got her naturopathic medical degree in Oregon and then did her residency in oncology in Illinois. She later practiced in Arizona and then from there ventured to Alaska in 2019 where she practiced in several oncology practices along allopathic providers in the MatSu, Soldotna,...

Send us Fan Mail Kirk Rose is the CEO of the Anchorage Community Land Trust (ACLT) . ACLT started in Mountain View in 2003 and has supported new housing, public spaces, and businesses ever since. Kirk began as an intern at the organization 15 years ago and has never left. We discuss his journey to this work and the specific role that ACLT plays in supporting foreign-born entrepreneurs here in Anch...

Send us Fan Mail Debbie Corbett is an archeologist who has been working in Alaska for over 40 years. After 7 years in the 1980s scouting ancient burial grounds all across Alaska for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she got her master's degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks where she specialized in Aleutian archeology. She had already spent time in the Aleutian islands and knew that this r...

Send us Fan Mail Bill Hill is the former superintendent of the Bristol Bay Borough School District. Raised in Kokhanok, his family moved to Naknek when he was a sophomore in high school. After earning his teaching credential, Bill returned to Naknek before moving with his wife and 4 kids to Juneau where he taught middle school. After his oldest two kids graduated from Juneau-Douglas High School, t...

Send us Fan Mail Harriet Drummond was first elected to the Anchorage School Board in 1994 where she served for nine years. She then represented West Anchorage on the Anchorage Assembly, leaving that post when she was elected to the Alaska State House in 2012 to represent Spenard, North Star, Forest Park, Huntington Park, north Midtown, Rogers Park and Geneva Woods for ten years. She chaired or co-...

Send us Fan Mail Elstun Lauesen grew up in Alaska and after dropping out of the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1970, he managed former Alaska State Senator Joe Josephson 's campaign for the US Senate to replace Bob Bartlett who had died in office; ultimately Joe lost the Democratic primary to Wendell Kay , and Republican Ted Stevens won that seat. After time at Harvard University (where he...

Send us Fan Mail Steve Williams is the director of Diversions Programming at the Anchorage Police Department. The Diversion Program allows officers to offer offenders a path to drug treatment instead of charges at the point of arrest. Previously, Steve was the CEO at the Alaska Mental Health Trust. And. prior to that, he worked for the mental health court . We discuss all three of those roles in d...

Send us Fan Mail Anna Taylor is the executive director of the Alaska Institute for Justice which is a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the rights of everyone living in Alaska regardless of immigration status. Anna is the daughter of a Vermont State House Rep father and a veterinarian mother. Anna got interested in law while living in Ghana, West Africa, and initially wanted to work...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Michael Livingston is an Unangax̂ historian. The Unangax̂ are the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands, also known by the Russian-given name Aleut. For many years it was thought that Benny Benson designed the Alaska state flag when he was 13 and that, because he had been born in Chignik, that he was Alutiiq. But thanks to the research and persistence of our guest today, B...

Send us Fan Mail Today, New Year’s Eve 2025, I thought I’d take a look back at a few episodes from the last year. I am in my 5th year of the East Anchorage Book Club podcast and last year I released 78 episodes. This podcast is extremely meaningful to me as both as a legislator and as a person: I learn about issues that I am unfamiliar with, I create relationships with unexpected people, and it re...

Send us Fan Mail Today's episode is part of a series called "Leaving America," about folks who have decided to move outside the country and how they did it.  Our guest is Joanna Keenan . Jo and I worked together in Santa Cruz, California. We were both physician assistants in the same emergency department at the local hospital there. Eight years ago Jo and her spouse Kelly retired to...

Send us Fan Mail As a 13-year-old, former Alaska State House Representative Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins headed Vermont Governor Howard Dean 's 2004 Presidential campaign in Alaska. He immersed himself in all things political as a high school student, but gave up politics when he got to college at Yale. During his junior year, he was contacted by several people encouraging him to return home to Si...

Send us Fan Mail This Christmas morning US Senator Lisa Murkowski discusses her book that came out last summer, Far From Home: An Alaskan Senator Faces the Extreme Climate of Washington, DC . And, although much of what we speak about is from the book, we also discuss her vote on HR 1 (referred to by President Donald Trump as the "One Big Beautiful Bill"), her concerns about the use of th...

Send us Fan Mail After a childhood in east Anchorage, Andrew Halcro worked his way up in his family's Avis Rental Car business eventually becoming CEO in 2002 after leaving the state house where he had served for four years representing the Sand Lake district of west Anchorage. After an unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2006, he continued a popular political blog until he became the president...

Send us Fan Mail Minnesota State House Representative Rick Hansen was first elected to represent South St. Paul in the Minnesota State House in 2004 along with his colleague Melissa Hortman who represented northern Minneapolis and went on to serve as Speaker of the Minnesota House for 6 years. On June 14, 2025, Melissa and her husband Mark were assassinated when they opened their front door to a m...

Send us Fan Mail John Heilman is a West Hollywood city council member and former mayor. West Hollywood was incorporated as a city in 1984, and John was elected to the first city council and has been serving almost continuously ever since. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California's law school where he was voted adjunct professor of the year in 2008, 2010, and 2016. He is also...

Send us Fan Mail Laura Norton-Cruz is a licensed master social worker, former teacher & victim advocate, artist, and mother of two elementary-aged children. Over the past two years, she has co-produced three documentaries with filmmaker Joshua Albeza Branstetter . The first, “At Home/In Home: Rural Alaska Childcare crisis ,” was based in Kotzebue and highlighted the dire lack of childcare in t...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Kathy McCue is an emergency medicine physician who first visited Alaska as a medical student in 1999. For 2 decades she staffed Anchorage ERs, mainly at the Alaska Native Medical Center but also at Providence, where she famously took care of Dan Bigley , author of Beyond the Bear , after a mauling left him blind and unlikely to survive. Dr. McCue moved her family in 2021 to Ne...