Irving Warner was born in Modesto, California in 1941 and graduated from San Francisco’s Balboa High School. He soon became involved in tournament chess, playing in the first Arthur Stamer Invitational Tournament at the Mechanics Institute. He moved to Alaska in 1964 where he lived until 1996. During that time he initially worked in fisheries research, with a brief tenure in sea bird studies. Switching careers at the age of 40, he received an M.A. in interdisciplinary studies from the University of Maine, Orono, in 1983, and he moved into community college teaching, teaching at Kodiak College and the University of Alaska until he took early retirement and took up full time writing. Since then has lived in Washington State and in Hawaii, and now resides near Tacoma, Washington. Warner published his first story in 1973, and he has continued to publish stories both in the U.S. and abroad. He was awarded an NEA Fellowship in fiction in 1989, and an Alaska State Council on the Arts Fellowship the same year. He was short listed in the 1990 Stand International Fiction competition, where his story ”Journal from the Bay of Islands” was published. “Islands” was the longest work of fiction ever published in that venerable literary journal up to that time. Twice his scripts were short listed in the Nicholl Screenwriting Competition, American Academy of Motion Pictures, finishing in 2002 in the top 20 out of 5500 entries. Collections of his short stories have appeared in 1978 (In the Islands of the Four Mountains and other stories) and in 1997 (In Memory of Hawks, and other Stories from Alaska). Also his stories have appeared in anthologies alongside William Kittridge, Tobias Wolf, and Raymond Carver. In 2002, his first novel Wagner, Descending: The Wrath of the Salmon Queen was published by Pleasure Boat Studio, and in 2007 the same publisher released the historical novel The War Journal of Lila Ann Smith. Crossing the Water, a collection of two trilogies set in Alaska then Hawaii, will be out in the spring of 2009, also from Pleasure Boat Studio.